Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthalerwas an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth12 December 1928
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.
I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.
We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.
The question of sex will take care of itself.
The price for living the life I have -- for any serious, devoted person, is that at times one must live alone, or feel alone. I think loneliness is associated in many people's minds when they think about success.
I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.
I follow the rules until I go against them all.
Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.
I don't resent being a female painter. I don't exploit it. I paint.
What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?
A picture that is beautiful, or that comes off, or that works, looks as if it was all made at one stroke.
In relations with people, as in art, if you always stick to style, manners, and what will work, and you're never caught off guard, then some beautiful experiences never happen.