Helen Frankenthaler Exhibit, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

HELEN FRANKENTHALER

Helen Frankenthaler is a member of the American Abstract Expressionist school of painting. Born in 1928 in New York City, she studied at the Dalton School under Ruffino Tamayo, continued at Bennington College where Paul Feely was an instructor, and in the 1950s worked with Hans Hoffman. Having met critics Clement Greenburg and artists David Smith, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Ms. Frankenthaler found a place among these greats with her first solo exhibition in 1951 and a retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1960. She is a transitional figure between first and second generation Abstract Expressionists. Her breakthrough painting, Mountains and Sea (1952) is a seminal statement of postwar American abstraction, as well as a primary influence on the “color field” painters like Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. In this work, and many thereafter, she introduced painting directly onto an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. Her oil paint was diluted with turpentine so the color could soak into the canvas, creating the technique “soak stain.” Ms. Frankenthaler’s has exhibited her work over six decades and spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuously producing vital and ever-changing work. Her most recent awards include the National Medal of Arts in 2001 and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 2003, and she is a member of the National Institute for Arts and Letters. Ms. Frankenthaler lives and works in Connecticut.

“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work…I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it.”