"What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?"
SYNOPSIS
The painter and printmaker Helen Frankenthaler was among the most influential artists of the mid-twentieth-century. Introduced early in her career to major Abstract Expressionists artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline (and later marrying Robert Motherwell), Frankenthaler was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting practices, but developed her own distinct approach to the style. She invented the "soak-stain" technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint onto canvas, producing luminous color washes that appeared to merge with the canvas and deny any hint of three-dimensional illusionism. Her breakthrough gave rise to the movement promoted by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg as the "next big thing" in American art: Color Field painting, marked by airy compositions that celebrated the joys of pure color and gave an entirely new look and feel to the surface of the canvas. Later in her career, Frankenthaler turned her attention to other artistic media, most notably woodcut, in which she achieved the quality of painting, in some cases replicating the effects of her soak-stain process.
KEY IDEAS
HELEN FRANKENTHALER BIOGRAPHY
Childhood
Helen Frankenthaler was born and raised in a wealthy Manhattan family with her two older sisters. Her parents recognized and fostered her artistic talent from a young age, sending her to progressive, experimental schools. The family took many trips in the summertime, and it was during these trips that Frankenthaler developed her love of the landscape, sea, and sky. Her father was a judge on the New York State Supreme Court and died of cancer when she was eleven years old. The loss affected her deeply, sending Helen into a four-year period of unhappiness during which time she suffered from intense migraines.
Early Training
At fifteen, Frankenthaler was sent to the Dalton School and began to study under the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. By the time she was sixteen, she decided to become an artist, enrolling in Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied under Paul Feeley, who was fundamental in arranging exhibitions of Abstract Expressionists.
Mature Period
In 1948, Frankenthaler moved back to New York. Two years later, she met the prominent art critic Clement Greenberg at an exhibition she organized for Bennington alumnae. This meeting began a romantic relationship between the two that would last for the next five years, during which time Greenberg introduced her to prominent painters who were among the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism - artists such as Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline. Greenberg also prompted Frankenthaler to study under Hans Hofmann in 1950. 1952 was a pivotal year for Frankenthaler; upon returning home from a trip to Nova Scotia, she created Mountains and Sea - a groundbreaking canvas where she pioneered her "soak-stain" technique. Working on a large canvas placed on the floor, Frankenthaler thinned her oil paints with turpentine and used window wipers, sponges, and charcoal outlines to manipulate the resulting pools of pigment. The following year, Greenberg brought the painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to Frankenthaler's studio to see Mountains and Sea; their excitement over the work led to their experimentation with Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique and development, with Frankenthaler, of Color Field painting. In the years that followed, Frankenthaler continued using the new method she developed, drawing on her abiding love of landscape for inspiration. In 1957, she met fellow artist Robert Motherwell, another leading Abstract Expressionist painter, and the following year they began their thirteen-year marriage, marking a period of mutual influence in their artwork. As Motherwell, like Frankenthaler, had come from privilege, the two were famously known as "the golden couple," arousing jealously on the part of the other, cash-poor members of the Abstract Expressionist movement for their luxurious lifestyle.
In the 1960s, Frankenthaler began to use acrylic paint in place of oil. She achieved large washes of bright color in acrylic paintings like Canyon(1965), which reveal the possibilities of this new material. In 1964, her work was included in an exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Identifying this new strain of painting that emerged out of Abstract Expressionism, Greenberg titled the show Post-Painterly Abstraction - his preferred title for the style of painting developed by Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland, which is more generally referred to as Color Field painting. Frankenthaler also began to show her work internationally, exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and the United States Pavilion at Expo, in Montreal in 1967. She simultaneously began to develop her proficiency in other artistic media; in particular, she embraced printmaking, creating woodcuts, aquatints, and lithographs that rivaled her painting in its inventiveness and beauty.
After her divorce from Motherwell in 1971, Frankenthaler traveled to the American Southwest. Two trips she made in the mid-1970s resulted in Desert Pass(1976) and several other works capturing the colors and tones of the Southwestern landscape.
Late Period
Frankenthaler continued making art during the 1980s and 1990s, up through the last years of her life. In addition to her work in painting and printmaking, she has experimented with a variety of other media, including clay and steel sculpture, even designing the sets and costumes for England's Royal Ballet. Several years after being honored at the prominent gallery Knoedler and Company with the exhibition Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades, Frankenthaler died in 2011 at her home in Darien, Connecticut.
LEGACY
Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique gave rise to the Color Field movement, having a decisive impact on the work of the other artists associated with this style, such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. In addition its striking departure from first-generation Abstract Expressionism, Color Field is also often seen as an important precursor of 1960s Minimalism, with its spare, meditative quality.
The soak-stained canvases of Frankenthaler and her fellow Color Field painters also resonated with the theories of the movement's biggest promoter, Clement Greenberg. Their lack of any hint of three-dimensional volume or illusionistic space seemed to embody what Greenberg articulated as the end result of modernist painting: its increasing move to embrace the intrinsic quality of its medium, which for him was the concept of "flatness," or the two-dimensionality of the picture plane.
HELEN FRANKENTHALER QUOTES
"What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?"
"Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away."
"Being the person I was and am, exposed to the things I have been exposed to, I could only make my painting with the methods--and with the wrist--I have."
INFLUENCES
Helen Frankenthaler Influences
Interactive chart with Helen Frankenthaler's main influencers, and the people and ideas that the artist influenced in turn.
