Helen Frankenthaler

American, 1928 - 2011

(not assigned)New York, New York

SchoolColor Field painting

Biography(b New York, 12 Dec 1928).
American painter and printmaker. She studied with Rufino Tamayo while at Dalton School, New York, with Paul Feeley (1910-66) at Bennington College, VT (1946-9), and privately with Wallace Harrison in 1949 and Hans Hofmann in 1950. In that year she met Clement Greenberg, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and others. Like several of the exponents of Abstract expressionism she was concerned with the forms and energies latent in nature. In the mythology of technical breakthrough that was part of the culture of the New York School, her work Mountains and Sea (1952; artist's col.; see fig.) has an established place. Extending Pollock's method of painting on unprimed canvases on the floor, she allowed thinner pigments to soak directly into the canvas. This created a closer relationship between image and surface, the weave of the raw canvas being visible within the painted image. At the same time the visibility of the canvas beneath the painted surface negated the sense of illusion and depth. It was a device that called attention to both the material and the nature of the medium. The technique also generated a new range of liquid-like atmospheric effects reminiscent of the watercolours of John Marin. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, the leading figures of a group sometimes known as the Washington color painters, were among several painters who saw Mountains and Sea in 1953 and developed its implications in their own work. Louis in particular pursued the possibilities of the technique of 'staining' colour into the canvas.
There is a strong sense of technical play in Frankenthaler's works, which are often meditations on the divisions and ambiguities of space. One of her subtlest and most abstract pieces of this kind is Seven Types of Ambiguity (1957; artist's col., see Rose, p. 65), in which, without major shifts in colour values, she explored depth and perspective in witty homage to the English literary critic William Empson, after whose book (London, 1930) of densely-layered criticism the painting is named. In 1958 she married Robert Motherwell. About 1957 she began to explore relationships between linear skeins and small sun-like shapes in serial works. This in turn gave way in the early 1960s to single stains and blots. Her next phase involved an expansion of form and the use of richer colours with acrylics, as in Cape (Provincetown) of 1964 (see United states of america, fig. 18). Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s she continued this larger scale of work in a conscious exploration of large abstract forms and their shifting relationship to the framing edge, as in Mauve District (1966; New York, MOMA), and she executed sequences of paintings in which she alternately emptied and filled the centre spaces, such as Stride (1969; New York, Met.).
Throughout her career Frankenthaler experimented with both form and materials, exhibiting sculpture in the mid-1970s and working with woodcuts and colour printing as in Essence Mulberry (woodcut, 1977; see 1980 exh. cat., p. 49). In the 1980s her work became calmer, the gesture less energetic, her range of colours more sombre. (Source: CHRISTOPHER BROOKEMAN, " Helen Frankenthaler," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press) Accessed April 14, 2004) http://www.groveart.com

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