Helen Frankenthaler, Basin, 1979, Acrylic on canvas, 52 x 106 inches, 132.1 x 269.2 cm, MMG#28016
© 2018 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
© Ernst Haas, Getty Images
HELEN FRANKENTHALER was born in New York City in 1928. She attended the Dalton School, where she studied under Rufino Tamayo. She received a BFA from Bennington College in Vermont in 1949. She returned to New York, where she became a notable Abstract Expressionist painter in the early 1950’s.
Her first solo museum retrospective was in 1960 at The Jewish Museum in New York City. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts and in 2003 she received the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. She is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Her work is included in many permanent collections across the country including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
Helen Frankenthaler died in Darien, CT in December of 2011.
Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011) had her first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951, an exhibition that synthesized the most radical aspects of works by Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, with ambitious canvases of textured surfaces, pale color, and calligraphic drawing. The following year, with Mountains and Sea, 1952, she created another kind of painterly space by staining unprimed canvas with oil paint while allowing telltale signs of drawing to remain.
The late Helen Frankenthaler famously "departed" from Jackson Pollock with her early stain paintings in the 1950s, but she kept on making departures for the rest of her long, innovative career.
When Helen Frankenthaler died in December 2011, two weeks after her 83rd birthday, most tributes to her invoked "Mountains and Sea," the delicately colored, luminous stain paintings that she made in 1952, as a precocious 23-year old, a work that has come to define her almost as narrowly as "The Scream" defines Edvard Munch. Just about every article recounted, as well, the story of the powerful effect "Mountains and Sea" had on Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, when they saw the picture in Frankenthaler's studio on a 1953 visit to New York, almost everyone quoted Louis' description of the seminal painting's young author as "the bridge between Pollock and what was possible."
The Directors of Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe mourn the passing of a true American visionary. Helen Frankenthaler's life and art produced a remarkable body of work that inspired an artistic movement and continues to inspire new generations of artists and viewers in her unique pursuit of truth and beauty. We will miss your grace and friendship but just need to look at your paintings to find the source of your spirit and the joy you have brought to us. Will Ameringer Miles McEnery James Yohe
