Helen Frankenthaler - abstract expressionist - part 1

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This is part one of a two-part post on the works of Helen Frankenthaler, abstract expressionist painter, and one-time wife of Robert Motherwell. Frankenthaler was born in New York in 1928. In 1945 she graduated from the Dalton School, where she studied with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. She later studied with Paul Feeley at Bennington College in Vermont, where she absorbed the visual language of Cubism and the formal structures of Old Master painting. After graduating in 1949, and having received a substantial inheritance, she studied privately with Hans Hofmann in 1950 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then returned to New York to paint full-time. Later that year while organising an exhibition at the Jacques Seligmann gallery, she met Clement Greenberg, through whom she would meet some of the central figures of the New York School, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith.

An exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler was focused on analysing and reproducing natural forms, as is apparent in Mountains and Sea (1952). Measuring approximately 3 metres wide and 2 metres high, Mountains and Sea matches the ambitious scale and gestural handling associated with the New York School, but Frankenthaler's method of paint application was markedly original: she thinned the oil paint to the consistency of watercolour so that it would soak into and stain the canvas rather than accumulate on its surface.

1952 Mountains and Sea oil

Inspired by Pollock's drip style, her soak-in technique resulted in fresh, appealing expanses of colour that spurred similar experiments by Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (whom Greenberg took to Frankenthaler's studio in 1953) and prefigured Colour Field painting of the later 1950s and 1960s by Louis, Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frankenthaler herself.
In 1958 Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell. At about the same time she began experimenting with the relationship between fine lines and small, sun-like shapes. In the early 1960s she started producing paintings featuring a single stain or blot; she also began to use acrylic paint to create richly coloured canvases, such as Cape (Provincetown) (1964).

1964 Cape, Provincetown

Frankenthaler and Motherwell divorced in 1971, and several years later she bought a second home and studio in Connecticut, where she ventured into the production of welded-steel sculptures, prints, and illustrated books. Further experiments with other mediums led her to design the sets and costumes for a production by England's Royal Ballet in 1985. Frankenthaler continued to focus on painting throughout this period, and maintains her painting practice to the present day.
Frankenthaler has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and New York universities. Her first solo exhibition took place at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, in the autumn of 1951. Numerous solo exhibitions of her work have followed, including retrospectives at the Jewish Museum, New York (1960); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969); Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (1980); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1985); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989).
Her many awards include First Prize for Painting at the first Paris Biennial (1959); Joseph E. Temple Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1968); New York City Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture (1986); and Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, College Art Association (1994). Frankenthaler lives and works in New York and Darien, Connecticut.