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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.
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