Helen Frankenthaler – Lessons with Rufino Tamayo, Hans Hofmann and Meyer Schapiro
Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City on 12 December 1928. The youngest of three sisters, her father Alfred Frankenthaler was appointed as judge at the New York Supreme Court the year after her birth, and her mother Martha Lowenstein Frankenthaler came from Germany. From a prosperous household, she attended private school and from 1945 received painting lessons with Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School in New York. In 1946 she studied in Vermont at Bennington College and from 1947 to 1949 at the Art Students League of New York. In addition, she took private lessons with Hans Hofmann in 1950 and studied art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. Primarily influenced by Cubism during her studies, she became acquainted not only with the conventions of the artworld during her five-year relationship with the influential critic Clement Greenberg, but in particular with Abstract Expressionism, of which Greenberg was one of its most committed and high-profile advocates.
Important inspiration from Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock
Helen Frankenthaler moved quickly and very confidently in New York’s art scene and thereby became acquainted with its most significant protagonists. The avant-garde artists Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock in particular were a lasting inspiration for the young artist’s development of her own pictorial language, which was characterised especially by an easy-going spontaneity and abstract style and it was during this stimulating time that she created one of her most famous pictures, Mountains and Sea. Kenneth Noland, Wilhelm de Kooning and Morris Louis all provided important influences with their work, and in 1958, Helen Frankenthaler married one of their art associates, Robert Motherwell. The marriage only lasted eleven years. She was already fully established as an artist by 1959 and took part in documenta II in Kassel. Alongside her painting, she made sculptures out of steel and terracotta from the 1970s.
dance with colour, teaching positions at various universities
Helen Frankenthaler’s domain was “stain painting”, her personal development of “dripping” which she had leant about from Jackson Pollock. In contrast to dripping, she allowed the colours to seep sensitively into the untreated, stained canvas, resulting in lyrically light compositions that clearly stood out from the energetic, often aggressive layers of paint of her predominantly male colleagues. It is precisely this unobtrusive serenity that gives Helen Frankenthaler’s pictures their seductive lightness. The viewer is not hassled, not challenged, but instead is lured, caressed, invited. Helen Frankenthaler did not work with colours, did not guide them or control them, but instead released them and left them to their own devices, at most perhaps gently guided and set on their way without force. Frankenthaler became a teacher herself in the 1980s, teaching at many schools and universities including the renowned Yale University, and was also a member of various art academies.
Helen Frankenthaler died in Darien, Connecticut on 27 December 2011.
Helen Frankenthaler - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
