Do you know that feeling when you have completely conflicting reactions to a person or an event? When a lot strikes you as admirable or interesting or unusual, but other things bug you, and you can’t quite find a resolution to that emotional tension? So it is with me and Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), today’s painter of choice, since large blocks of landscape colors reminded me of her color fields.

She was born into an upper-class, wealthy and cultured New York family and early on given a sense of superiority by her father, New York state supreme court judge Alfred Frankenthaler. Her life was defined by remaining within that class and its perks, with multiple residences, staff, the works. Her education was privileged from the beginning, from ultra-conservative prep-schools to progressive institutions like Bennington College. Affairs and then marriage to arrived art critics and artists opened the door to the intensely creative world of the 1950s, including exposure to Jackson Pollock who stimulated her thinking about painting method. A short stint of being mentored by Hans Hofman, one of my own favorites (I wrote about him here) set her on her path, never looking back after that.

Yet she paved her own way, and despite all her socially somewhat conservative inclinations she was nothing less than revolutionary when it came to her art. And she came to it on her own – after a bitter break-up after 5 years with Clement Greenberg, the art critic du jour, and before her 1958 marriage to Robert Motherwell, another unusually wealthy artist, she managed to achieve recognition as one of the few women in the mid-century art world by pushing away from expressionism into true abstraction. (The marriage ended in 1971, she later wed an investment banker.)

She was 23 years old when she started to paint in ways that would be known as the color field movement, influencing other artists later associated with that school. Pouring thinned oil paint on unprepared canvasses which absorbed it while flat on the ground (rather than using a brush), she created luminous, evanescent paintings that hinted at landscape but were as ambiguous as only good abstract art can be. British art critic Nigel Gosling reviewed her in 1964: “If any artist can give us aid and comfort,” he wrote, “Helen Frankenthaler can with her great splashes of soft colour on huge square canvases. They are big but not bold, abstract but not empty or clinical, free but orderly, lively but intensely relaxed and peaceful … They are vaguely feminine in the way water is feminine – dissolving and instinctive, and on an enveloping scale.”

I have always thought that she had the courage to create beauty (for women in general a treacherous undertaking, in my view,) but sometimes it was almost too beautiful. I was gratified when I found this review by Deborah Solomon which expresses my reservations in better ways than I could. Written in 1989 for the New York Times, she teases apart the contradictions between the artist’s bourgeois, anti-feminist, controlling nature and her lyrical work that depends to a large extent on accidents and improvisation.

It was, above all, beauty she was after, managing to translate ephemeral watercolor-like paintings onto a truly large scale. In later years sponges, squeegees and mops were added to the mix, now spreading diluted acrylics onto raw canvas, but the style pretty much remained the same, yet nowhere seeming boring. She did not seem to mind that the art world had moved on and the younger set deemed her caught in the past – that I admire too: to stick to your ways of expression independent of vogue.

In her own words:”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?”

Below are two videos describing her life and recording her musings during a visit here at Portland State University some 50 years ago.

And here is a local artist, recently discussed, who continues a tradition of luminosity.

And here is music that reminds me of Frankenthaler’s soothing effects on my mind – an unapologetic melodic approach with hints of romanticism.