Helen Frankenthaler 1928-2011

By Sophie Turner

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and sea, 1952. Oil on unprimed canvas, 220 x 297.8 cm, Collection of the artist

‘A bridge between Pollock and what was possible’, the biography of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) is continually bookended with the developments in Abstract Expressionism; the 1950s action painters’ influence upon her and her impact upon the 1960s colour field painters. Frankenthaler’s lengthy career, spanning six decades, focused upon abstracted colour and the fluidity of paint. Her practice suggests spontaneity and a focus upon individualism. Thus, instead of repeatedly positioning her between two competing modes of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler’s work demands focussed attention.

Born on 12th December 1928, New York; Frankenthaler studied at Bennington College under Paul Freely, an abstract painter and, returning to New York, with the cubist, Wallace Harrison. After graduating in 1950, Frankenthaler’s artistic career was launched by Adolpho Gottleib, who chose her painting, Beach (1950), for his exhibition Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. During this time, she became acquainted with the art critic, Celement Greenburg, who introduced her to artists from the New York School. This group included artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, who rejected traditional easel painting in favour of a new way of representing the post-war world through abstraction.

Whilst other artists of Frankenthaler’s second post-war generation imitated the innovative techniques fostered by the first abstract expressionists, Frankenthaler claimed ‘You could become a de Kooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock.’ This ideology foregrounds her most seminal work Mountains and Sea (1952), influenced by her visit to Nova Scotia. The painting documents her experimental soak-stain technique. With her interest in the manipulation of materials, the painting’s focus is considered the display of the properties of oil paint rather than the depiction of a landscape. Frankenthaler used diluted oil paint to flood large unprimed canvases and then disrupted the pools of paint to create washes of colour. The resulting stains exhibited a disembodied expanse that captured a luminosity usually associated with watercolour whilst still achieving a sense of depth, as the paint soaked directly into the canvas’s cotton fibres. Characteristic of her developing style; Frankenthaler considered the material’s capacity for variability, rather than action painters’ hand in the manipulation of paint, the leading aspect in her paintings’ conception.

With Morris Louis’s consideration that Frankenthaler ‘bridged the gap’, Frankenthaler’s stain technique has been cited as the inspiration for the 1960s development in abstract expressionism, with colour-field painting. The new style considered the relationship between large plains of colour, where the visual appeal of the colour was meant to evoke emotion. However, where colour field painters often worked in series and let their canvas’s size dictate a painting’s composition, Frankenthaler’s practice was concerned with spontaneity. Additionally, the colour-field painters’ separated their work from any narrative context; whilst still abstract, the titles of Frankenthaler’s works, ranging from Nude (1958) to Southern Exposure (2005), explore how the paint’s fluidity creates allusions that reflect back upon the self.

Frankenthaler would continue to experiment throughout her lifetime. Early on in her career she transitioned from painting with oils to acrylic; as the latter did not produce the ‘halo effect’ of oil surrounding the pigment. Alongside her innovations in painting, Frankenthaler is known for her contribution to the twentieth century ‘print-renaissance’. An example being her woodblock prints, such as Madame Butterfly (2000), which achieved a similar luminosity and vibrancy of colour to that seen within her soak-stain paintings. Her work is continually exhibited within the United States and abroad, with her critical acclaim acknowledged in her award of the National Medal of Arts in 2001. With her lengthy career and highly individualised innovations, instead of reducing her corpus to the epoch of the early 1950s, we should view her as an artist who continually strived to experiment through different media till her death on 27th December 2011.

Bibliography

John Elderfield, Painted on 21st street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959 (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2013)

Karen Wilkin,, ‘Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), American Art, 26:3, 2012, pp. 100-104

Joan Marter, Women of abstract expressionism (Denver: Denver Art Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)