With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Helen Frankenthaler
Painting/Drawing
1928 – 2011
Prominent Abstract Expressionist painter from the 1950s who pioneered the technique of staining unprimed canvas with oil paints, known as Color Field painting. In the late 1960s Frankenthaler began experimenting with alternative media and embraced printmaking, woodcuts, and lithographs. She continued experimenting with different media including clay and steel sculpture and set and costume design.
- Biography/Description of Work
Frankenthaler, born in New York City, came from a prosperous Manhattan family. At age fifteen, she enrolled in the Dalton School in New York where she studied under the Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo. She completed her undergraduate work at Bennington College in Vermont where she studied with Paul Freeley. After graduating with her B.A. in 1949, she returned to New York City. A year later she organized an exhibition for Bennington alumnae artists in New York. It was at this exhibition that Frankenthaler met Clement Greenberg who introduced her to prominent artists like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Adolph Gottlieb. It was Gottlieb who selected her work for inclusion in his Fifteen Unknowns exhibit and, in 1951, Frankenthaler was given her first solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Her experimentation in the realm of avant-garde Abstract Expressionism began after seeing an exhibition of Jackson Pollock’s work, although her work on unprimed canvases differed from the layered look of Pollock’s pieces. From 1958 to 1971 Frankenthaler was married to painter Robert Motherwell. She then moved to Connecticut in the 1970s, maintaining her primary studio in Stamford and later, after her marriage with Stephen M. DuBrul Jr., in Darien.
- Sources view
- Connecticut Womens Hall of Fame 2005 [ http://www.cwhf.org/inductees/arts-humanities/helen-m-frankenthaler#.VQnPYI7F98E ] Obituary, New York Times. [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/arts/helen-frankenthaler-abstract-painter-dies-at-83.html ] Hirschberg, Stephen. 1979. Historical & Architectural Survey of Stamford. Connecticut Historical Commission. Moss, Jacqueline. 10/02/1983. ‘Lyrical painter Helen Frankenthaler has inventive, yet durable vision.’ Connecticut Newspapers. p. F2. Copy courtesy of Wes Haynes.
- Associated Resource(s)