This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following was compiled and written by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California:
Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City on December 28, 1928, the third and youngest daughter of a noted justice of the New York Supreme Court and his German born wife. She attended the exclusive Brearley School in Manhattan and the Dalton School where her art teacher was Rufino Tamayo. He suggested that she go to Bennington College to study painting; her instructor there was Paul Feeley, an academic Cubist. She graduated from Bennington College in 1949 and studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1950.
In her early days as an artist, Frankenthaler shared a Greenwich Village studio and its rent with Friedel Dzubas, whom she had met at the home of the critic Clement Greenberg. Her circle of friends included Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell. In April 1958 she married the leading Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell. Their honeymoon was spent traveling in France and Spain and they returned to a brownstone in New York. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1970.
When Jackson Pollock first exhibited some of his paintings in 1951, they exerted a great influence on Frankenthaler. Their scale. free graphic rhythms, and color impressed her strongly; but above all she was struck by Pollock's method of dripping paint directly onto the raw canvas, emphasizing both the flatness of the painting and the physical actuality of the support.
Carrying this technique still further, Frankenthaler thins her pigment with large amounts of turpentine so that they soak directly through the unprimed cloth and stains it. The resultant image no longer lies on top of the picture plane but is embedded within; the transparent mat colors of varying intensity modulate from light to dark without creating any illusion that they exist in a space other than that of the woven textural surface. Frankenthaler also adopted Pollock's practice of painting with the canvas stretched out on the floor, allowing the artist to be "in" the picture, work from all four sides, and produce an image seen from above. She has always delighted in in the way paint behaves on paper. The freshness, directness and potency added to her dramatic use of color, line and space.
In the early 1960s Frankenthaler switched from oils to acrylics, with which she could achieve a watercolor effect by thinning the paint even further. She experimented with the use of sponges, heavier brushes, thicker globs of paint, etc. She influenced a whole generation of color-field painters, including Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.
Sources include:
An initation to See with comments by Helen M. Frankenthaler
Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, 1986-7
Karen Wilkin in Reviews column in Artnews, February 1996
World Artists 1950-80 by Claude Marks
Ruth Bass in Reviews column in ARTnews, September 1989
Joanna Shaw-Eagle in Artist’s Dialogue in Architectural Digest (date unknown).
Time Magazine, March 28, 1969
In Pursuit of Beauty in Newsweek magazine, June 12,
Working Papers by Maurice Poirier in ARTnews, Summer 1985
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Manhattan, New York, Helen Frankenthaler became the leader of the Color Field painters in New York City, emerging in the 1950s under the influence of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Her work is a transition from Abstract Expressionism.
She was educated at New York's Dalton School, and in high school studied with Rufino Tamayo and later with Hans Hofmann. She attended Bennington College. Her family vacationed in Maine where she learned to love open views of land and sea, subject matter and an attitude of expansiveness reflected in her canvases.
With a studio in New York, her mentor became art critic Clement Greenberg who introduced her to most of the prominent 1950s artists including Pollock and DeKooning who, in turn, became her inspirations for gestural technique, Action Painting. From 1958 to 1971, she was married to artist Robert Motherwell.
Her stain painting technique was novel. Rather than painting on a primed canvas, she poured paint over an unprimed surface that allowed the paint to soak into the canvas. This staining and the process involved became her trademark style, and a whole generation of artists, known as Color Field painters, followed her. Her large studio has been in New York City.
She had a brief period when she experimented with sculpture. In the summer of 1972, she worked with Anthony Caro in his studio in London, and she used some of the steel that Caro had acquired from the estate of David Smith. She had first met Caro in New York in 1959, and they had formed a friendship during which she expressed an interest in experimenting with sculpture. During the two weeks, she completed ten welded steel sculptures in abstract style, and titles included Heart of London, Ceiling Horses, Matisse Table, Ten After All and Ceiling Horses. However, after this intense period of sculpting, "Frankenthaler never again muade sculptures in steel, and the sojourn in Caro's studio was never repeated. The energetic, vital constructions she completed in London leave us wishing she'd gone back often." (Wilkin). In 2006, Knoedler & Company held an exhibit of the work she completed with Caro.
In 1999, she won the Jerusalem Prize for Arts and Letters, given by the Friends of Israel's National Academy of Arts and Design.
Partial source:
Karen Wilkin, "Frankenthaler's Nerves of Steel", Art in America, May 2007, pp. 184-187
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Biography from Bernard Jacobson Gallery:
| Helen
Frankenthaler was born in New York City in 1928. She attended Dalton
School, where she studied art with Rufino Tamayo, with whom she
continued to study after graduating. At Bennington College she studied
art with Paul Feeley and, during non-resident term, with Wallace
Harrison in New York. In 1949, Frankenthaler received a bachelor of
arts degree from Bennington. In 1950, she studied for three weeks with
Hans Hofmann in Provincetown.
Frankenthaler has taught and
lectured throughout the world and served on the Fulbright Selection
Committee and the National Council on the Arts of the National
Endowment for the Arts, among other such posts. She received numerous
awards internationally, including the New York City Mayors Award of
Honour for Arts and Culture and the Distinguished Artists Award for
Lifetime Achievement, College Art Association, 1994, and countless
honorary degrees.
Major exhibitions include:
1951 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (first solo exhibition)
1957 Young America 1957, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
1960 Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings, The Jewish Museum, New York.
1975 Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings 1969 -1974, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and United States tour.
1980 Helen Frankenthaler: Works of the Seventies, Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI, and Michigan touring;
Helen Frankenthaler: Prints 1961 - 1979, Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA, and United States tour.
1998 After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956 - 1959, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York;
Helen
Frankenthaler: Three Decades of Paintings, Ameringer Howard, Boca
Raton, FL. 2000 Frankenthaler on Paper, Bernard Jacobson Gallery,
London.
Monographs and Major Exhibition Catalogues: (Very Selected Readings)
Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings. Exhibition catalogue with essay by Frank OHara. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1960.
Helen Frankenthaler. Exhibition catalogue with essay by E.C. Goosen. Bennington, Vermont: Bennigton College, 1978.
Exhibition catalogue with essay by Carl Belz Waltham, Massachusetts: Rose Art Museum, 1981.
Helen
Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective, exhibition catalogue with
essay by E.A. Carmean Jr. New York and Fort Worth, Texas: Harry N.
Abrams and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1989.
Cited Articles:
Frank OHara, "Helen Frankenthaler," Art News (December 1954):53. Hilton Kramer, "Art: Special Breed at Folk Art Show," The New York Times (December 2, 1977). Arther C. Danto, "Helen Frankenthaler," The National (August 21/28, 1989): 217-20.
Honorary Degrees:
Doctor of Human Letters, Skidmore College, 1969
Doctor of Fine Arts, Smith College, 1973
Doctor of Fine Arts, Moore College, 1974
Doctor of Fine Arts, Bard College, 1976
Doctor of Art, Radcliffe College (centennial), 1978
Doctor of Art, Amherst College, 1979
Doctor of Fine Arts, New York University, 1979
Doctor of Art, Harvard University, 1980
Doctor of Fine Arts, Philadelphia College of Art, 1980 Doctor of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, 1985 |
Biography from Rogallery.com:
| Born in Manhattan, New York, she became the leader of the Color Field painters in New York City, emerging in the 1950s under the influence of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Her work is a transition from Abstract Expressionism.
She was educated at New York's Dalton School, and in high school studied with Rufino Tamayo and later with Hans Hofmann. She attended Bennington College. Her family vacationed in Maine where she learned to love open views of land and sea, subject matter and an attitude of expansiveness reflected in her canvases.
With a studio in New York, her mentor became art critic Clement Greenberg who introduced her to most of the prominent 1950s artists including Pollock and DeKooning, her inspirations for gestural technique, Action Painting. From 1958 to 1971, she was married to artist Robert Motherwell.
Her technique was novel. Rather than painting on a primed canvas, she poured paint over an unprimed surface that allowed the paint to soak into the canvas. This staining and the process involved became her trademark style, and a whole generation of artists, known as Color Field painters, followed her. Her large studio has been in New York City.
In 1999, she won the Jerusalem Prize for Arts and Letters, given by the Friends of Israel's National Academy of Arts and Design. |
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