Matthews Gallery

Helen Frankenthaler: December/12/1928 - December 27, 2011 

Helen Frankenthaler was born in 1928 in New York. Her family encouraged her and her sisters to attend college and become professionals. Frankenthaler attended Bennington College in Vermont and learned about cubist style and theory under artist, Paul Feeley, later studying privately under Hans Hofmann, both of whom greatly effected her interest in abstract expressionism. 

While at the start of her artistic career in New York, Frankenthaller was setting up an exhibition at the Jacques Seligmann gallery where she met Clement Greenberg, the theorist behind the idea of Modernist Art. A very watered down version of Greenberg ideas include that painting should only be about painting. Figures, textures, multi-media, symbolism, allegories all get in the way of the painting. Many of the Greenberg’s followers focused on using paint that celebrated what paint was able to do as a medium. One main point of Greenberg’s ideas dealt with the flatness of painting. To stay true to the medium of paint, paintings should be flat and embrace the qualities of paint, in that there was no texture just forms of pigment on the canvas. 

Frankenthaler was a very important member of the group of artists surrounding Greenberg. Her unique approach to Color Field Art was so coherent with Greenberg’s ideas, that she became sort of the poster kid for Modernist art. 

Frankenthaler would pant using oil paint diluted with turpentine on very large scale canvases. She got the oil paint to an almost watercolor-like texture and would paint, smear, push the paint onto the unprimed canvas which was usually un-stretched and on the floor. Because she used unprimed canvas, a few of her works are currently falling apart and being eaten away from the chemicals in the oil paints and paint thinner. 

Frankenthaler was very conscious of overworking paintings, She tried to make them look as effortless and as complete as possible. In an interview she mentions that while she was painting one of her works she felt like she was finished, but later that night she decided to add a little bit of green in the corner. when she woke up in the morning she realized that it was too overworked, that bit of green paint was too much, she still sold the painting, but she knew that it overworked.

Helen Frankenthaler was really an incredible artist her works are in collections around the world including the Met, Centre de Pompidou, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and many others. She received many awards in her lifetime and served on the Council of the Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 - 1992, and greatly opposed the ‘culture wars’ and government censorship of art while she served on the council. 

Want to learn more about women abstract expressionists? Meet Beatrice Mandelman and Janet Lippincott.