How Helen Frankenthaler Blossomed Into a Great Artist
News that Helen Frankenthaler died yesterday at the age of 83 after a long illness is making a lot of people recall just how important a figure the self-described “saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington” was in the history of 20th century American art. Schooled in Cezanne and Cubism during her college days, Frankenthaler found her way in the rough and tumble art world ofAbstract Expressionism with a combination of personal beauty and brains that boys club couldn’t ignore. Often ignored for being too soft, too feminine in her art, Helen Frankenthaler’s death’s reminding us that a lady can be a painter, too, and a great one.
Helen grew up in New York City’s posh Upper East Side as the youngest daughter of a New York State Supreme Court judge. Surrounded by advantages, she absorbed the intellectual and cultural life around her. Helen studied in high school with Rufino Tamayo, a Mexican artist steeped in all the hot modernist movements and highly skilled in printmaking—a genre that Frankenthaler would make her own years later. Tempted to become an art historian and even going to Columbia briefly to pursue that career, Frankenthaler instead chose the more difficult road of a female artist in mid-century America.
Meeting art critic Clement Greenberg in 1950 changed the course of Helen’s life. Greenberg fell hard for Helen’s talent as much as her beauty. (Remember, supermodel Stephanie Seymourplayed Helen in the movie Pollock.) For the next five years, Greenberg and Frankenthaler were lovers. Greenberg introduced Helen to the burgeoning art scene and its rising stars: Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others. What Frankenthaler made of those opportunities, however, was all her own doing.
Helen saw her first Pollock drip painting in 1950. The idea of painting on a canvas flat on the floor intrigued her. Before you cast her as Jack the Dripper’s kid sister, however, you must recognize how she took that concept and added her own takes on Cezanne, Cubism, and other AbExes such as Rothko and how they all played games with the painting surface. Soon, Frankenthaler began experimenting with staining color directly onto unprimed canvas by diluting oil paint with turpentine and allowing the colors to bleed and combine in startling new combinations to strange and wonderful new effects. Few paintings can claim to fire the starting gun for a whole art movement, ala Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, but Frankenthaler’s 1952 painting Mountains and Sea started the movement eventually known as Color Fieldpainting. Both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland acknowledged Mountains and Sea as showing them the next direction art would take after Abstract Expressionism’s day in the sun.
