Cancel
CreatorsPublishersAdvertisers

Helen Frankenthaler

avatar
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s until 2011), she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as Color Field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Frankenthaler had a home and studio in Darien, Connecticut.
Expandarrow_down
Born
1928-12-12
Birth Place
New York City, US
Nationality
American
Place Of Death
Darien, Connecticut, US
Education
Dalton School Bennington College
Expandarrow_down
New York City, NYnewbooksnetwork.com

Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York

At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew—and left her mark on—the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions.
Visual Artkwbu.org

David and Art - Helen Frankenthaler, Part I

Telling the story of a woman who moved American painting onward from a once dominant style. Artist biographies are, for me, a pretty safe bet when it comes to reading material. If it’s about an artist I like, whose work I like, I can get a lot out of a good biography. There’s a new one out of an artist named Helen Frankenthaler that, while I haven’t got the book yet, is giving me a chance to reflect on her and her work and I’m looking forward to reading it. She deserves a good.
Picture for David and Art - Helen Frankenthaler, Part I
RELATED CHANNELS
News Break
Entertainment
News Break
Visual Art
Visual Artcarthagenewsonline.com

artNotes from Hyde House: Colorful Coney Island and Helen Frankenthaler

I have been at the New Yorker again; or rather the New Yorker has been at me! Grabbed me the minute I lifted the most recent issue from the mail box. What a gloriously celebratory cover! The perfectly titled illustration, “Coney Island Swings Back”, painted by Lorenzo Mattotti, pictures a colorfully clad, happy couple suspended high and sharing a kiss midair against a cerulean sky above a tented, roller-coastered, ferris-wheeled midway. Just makes me smile really, really wide!
Overland, MOSt. Louis Post-Dispatch

Vibrant new portrait of artist Helen Frankenthaler by Alexander Nemerov

There are doorstop biographies, and then there are appreciations. Alexander Nemerov has taken the latter approach in “Fierce Poise,” his vibrant, sympathetic portrait of Helen Frankenthaler. It focuses on 11 consequential days in the 1950s, the decade when she came of age as one of the leading painters of her generation.
Visual ArtNPR

With 'Fierce Poise,' Helen Frankenthaler Poured Beauty Onto Canvas

Powerful, no? And gorgeous. Helen Frankenthaler did it in 1973 — 20 years after making a painting that took Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism a step further. In 1950 she was wowed by the ropes and squiggles of paint Pollock was wrestling onto unstretched canvas on the floor of his barn.
RELATED PEOPLE
Person
Leonardo Da Vinci
Visual ArtPosted by
The Associated Press

Review: Vibrant new portrait of artist Helen Frankenthaler

“Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York,” by Alexander Nemerov (Penguin Press) There are doorstop biographies, and then there are appreciations. Alexander Nemerov has taken the latter approach in “Fierce Poise,” his vibrant, sympathetic portrait of Helen Frankenthaler. It focuses on 11 consequential days in the 1950s, the decade when she came of age as one of the leading painters of her generation.
Visual ArtPosted by
ARTnews

How a Moment of Crisis Led Helen Frankenthaler to Create an Iconic Artwork

Helen Frankenthaler came in to the studio at two in the afternoon, moaning and groaning. She had just rented this working space on West 23rd Street, a few blocks down the street from her London Terrace apartment. The studio was a quiet skylighted loft in the back of the building. A canvas lay on the floor before her. Inspired by the art of Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings she had first encountered some two years before, she set to work.
Visual Artmsn.com

Review: Helen Frankenthaler, underrated artist? A tantalizing but incomplete new bio of her rise

The cover of “Fierce Poise,” a new biography of the painter Helen Frankenthaler, features a famous photograph of the artist, shot by Gordon Parks, from a 1957 article in Life magazine on “Woman Artists in Ascendance.” Frankenthaler appears “pouty, confident, and serene,” writes Alexander Nemerov, her latest biographer. “She likely understood nearly as well as Parks how to craft an image exactly for the magazine’s massive target audience.”
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
News Break
Arts
News Break
Paintings