The art world lost an important person today. Abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler died at the age of 83.
Born in a wealthy family, Helen was a New Yorker who was heavily influenced by Clement Greenberg (whom she had a personal relationship with), and Jackson Pollock. "In the early 1950s, Frankenthaler started painting with her canvasses flat on the floor after seeing Jackson Pollock do it. She liked the gesture and the attitude of working on the floor, she told NPR in 1988, "but I wanted to work with shapes in a very different way."-NPR News
Many Critics agreed that Helen's work was merely "pretty" and pleasing to the eye.."But Earl Powell, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., rejects that charge, by writing,"It is not cloying," Powell says. "It's not pretty in a pejorative sense. But it really rises to challenge the best work of her time."
Frankenthaler did not consider herself a Feminist, just an Abstract Expressionist Painter trying to make her way in the Art World dominated by Men.
Her creations will be that much more valuable, and her influence on art will be missed.
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