September, 2013 - Helen Frankenthaler - Canvas Back

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. 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 painting that came to be known as Color Field. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at MOMA. Frankenthaler had been on the faculty of Hunter College. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
     Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and progressive intellectual family that encouraged all three daughters to prepare themselves for professional careers. Frankenthaler studied at the Dalton School and also at Bennington College in Vermont. She met Clement Greenberg in 1950 and had a five-year relationship with him. She was later married to fellow artist Robert Motherwell, from 1958 until they divorced in 1971. Both born of wealthy parents, the pair was known as "the golden couple" and noted for their lavish entertaining.
     Initially associated with abstract expressionism her career was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of Mountains and Sea. In it, she introduced the technique of painting directly onto an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine so that the color would soak into the canvas. This technique, known as "soak stain" was used by Jackson Pollock and others and launched the second generation of the Color Field school of painting. Frankenthaler did not consider herself a feminist: she said "For me, being a 'lady painter' was never an issue. I don’t resent being a female painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint.“ At her death in 2011 it became widely known that Frankenthaler tried to stop the support of the National Endowment for the Arts to artists and was one of those responsible for the NEA dropping individual grants to artists. In a 1989 commentary for the New York Times, she wrote that, while "censorship and government interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and not part of the democratic process," controversial grants to Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work "of increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art ... in the guise of endorsing experimentation?"

the Drink:

Canvas Back:

1 oz bourbon

1/2 oz sweet vermouth

1/4 oz gin

1/4 oz orange curacao

1 dash Angostura bitters

1 dash fresh lemon juice

Drinkability:  2
Drunkability:  4
Taxic Diversity:  4
Accessibility: 4
Priority for Conservation:  4

Comments: "this was our favorite of the night"

From "American Women Artists of the 20th C." hosted by FluffyRuffle