An American painter born of abstract expressionism, Helen Frankenthaler made a major contribution to the history of post-war American painting. She was born in Manhattan, New York in 1928 and will be a New Yorker at heart all her life. A student of the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and Meyer...

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  Biography of Helen Frankenthaler

  An American painter born of abstract expressionism, Helen Frankenthaler made a major contribution to the history of post-war American painting. She was born in Manhattan, New York in 1928 and will be a New Yorker at heart all her life. A student of the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and Meyer Schapiro, she studied art at Dalton School and Bennington College in Vermont; she met Clement Greenberg in 1950 and had a five-year relationship with him; he introduced her to David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Elaine and Willem of Kooning and Franz Kline, among others.
Inspired by cubism in her early days, her work then turned to landscape themes and reflected the influence of European painting. Influenced by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Tamayo, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler's art quickly evolved. The artist married the painter Robert Motherwell, with whom she lived from 1958 to 1971.
In 1952, she exhibited "Mountains and Sea", a painting that made her famous, the painting spreading out in puddles of colour forming shapes and spots of colour. With this work, the artist developed the technique of "stained color", through which the paint, used as a dye, is immersed directly in the canvas. Such a technique, at the origin of "color fied painting", paved the way for painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland or Jules Olitski. She immediately established herself within the pictorial avant-garde dominated by male stars. However, his work is interpreted as too beautiful and too feminine. Helen Frankenthaler hardened her paintings in 1959-1960, using a thicker paint, missing the canvas, adding doodles. In 1961-1962, her works became smaller, the paintings flowed again, the forms becoming evasive.
Begun in 1961, Helen Frankenthaler attached great importance to her graphic work; it lasted 35 years of creation, producing 235 prints in different techniques: lithographs, serigraphs, engravings, often in mixed techniques (etchings, aquatints, soft varnishes, dry points, burins), stencils, engraved wood, mixed techniques, "monoprints", monotypes or mixographies.
In 1989, Helen Frankenthaler will be the subject of a vast retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. This great artist died in 2011, she was 83 years old.
  

  

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