1928

Helen Frankenthaler is born in New York City on December 12, the youngest daughter of Martha and Alfred Frankenthaler.

1946–49

She studies painting with Paul Feeley at Bennington College in Vermont.

1948

She makes her first trip to Europe.

1949

She graduates and returns to New York, where she has a studio.

1950

Frankenthaler begins a relationship with critic Clement Greenberg, who introduces her to New York School artists Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith.

Adolph Gottlieb places her work in a group show at the Kootz Gallery, Fifteen Unknowns.

1951

Frankenthaler is the youngest out of seventy-two artists showing in the 9th Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture in New York City. She frequents Smith’s home and studio in Bolton Landing, New York, and acquires his work Portrait of the Eagle’s Keeper (1948–49). She has her first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

1952

In October, she paints Mountains and Sea, her first work using the “soak-stain” technique.

1953

Frankenthaler’s second solo show includes Mountains and Sea.

Greenberg shows the painting to Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland; both begin experimenting with the soak-stain technique.

She spends the summer traveling in Spain and southern France.

1954

In the summer, Frankenthaler and Greenberg visit Madrid, then Italy. They visit Peggy

Guggenheim in Venice and see the 27th Biennale, where Smith is one of the artists representing the United States.

1956

Frankenthaler’s Trojan Gates (1955) is acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1957

In December, Frankenthaler’s work is included in a group exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery. She and Robert Motherwell attend the opening as a couple.

1958

Motherwell and Frankenthaler wed on 6 April and honeymoon in Spain and France. They rent a villa in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and set up separate studios.

1959

Frankenthaler begins showing her work at the André Emmerich Gallery. She and Motherwell rent a house in Falmouth, Massachusetts, for the summer. Their guests include David Smith and Mark Rothko. Anthony Caro travels to the US for the first time and meets Frankenthaler, Motherwell, and Smith.

1960

Frankenthaler’s first retrospective, curated by poet Frank O’Hara, opens at the Jewish

Museum, New York. In the summer, Frankenthaler and Motherwell travel to Paris and then to Alassio, where they set up studios.

1961

Frankenthaler and Motherwell spend the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and establish studios. They spend most summers during the ’60s there. She begins making prints at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island, New York.

1962

She begins experimenting with acrylic paints.

1963

She visits Anne Truitt’s first solo show at the André Emmerich Gallery.

Shortly after, the artists begin a correspondence that will last decades.

1964

Frankenthaler is included in the Post-Painterly Abstraction group exhibition curated by Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

1965

Smith dies in a car crash in May. Frankenthaler writes, “We’ll never recover from the shock of losing him. We miss him terribly.”

1966

Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski are chosen for the US Pavilion at the 33rd Venice Biennale. Caro is one of the British Pavilion’s five artists.

1969

Frankenthaler’s paintings retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, before traveling to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, the Orangerie Herrenhausen in Hanover, and Kongresshalle Berlin.

Frankenthaler is the only woman included in New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

1970

Frankenthaler moves her studio to East 83rd Street in New York City.

1971

Frankenthaler and Motherwell divorce in the summer of 1971. Frankenthaler continues to live at East 94th Street.

1972

Barbara Rose’s monograph of Frankenthaler’s paintings is published.

She produces ten sculptures at Caro’s London studio, some using materials from Smith’s Bolton Landing studio that Caro acquired.

1973

She produces her first woodcut, East and Beyond, at ULAE.

1974

She summers at Ocean Drive West, Shippan Point, Stamford, Connecticut, overlooking Long Island Sound, and establishes a studio.

1978

She purchases a home on Shippan Point and establishes a studio there.

1984

Frankenthaler designs sets and costumes for Michael Corder’s ballet Number Three, performed by the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, London, in spring 1985.

1985

Frankenthaler: Works on Paper 1949–1984 opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

1988

She completes Gateway with Tyler Graphics Ltd., a three-panel screen made with prints and bronze panels cast at the Tallix Foundry, Beacon, New York.

1989

Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Frankenthaler, John Elderfield’s monograph of the artist, is published.

1998

After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956–1959 opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and travels to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.

Frankenthaler and DuBrul depart from East 94th Street, moving home and her studio to Darien, Connecticut.

1991

She leaves her New York studio after 21 years. Her new studio on Saddle Rock Road at Shippan Point becomes her primary painting space.

1992

She begins to show her work with Knoedler & Company, New York.

She meets Stephen DuBrul in July. They wed in 1994.

1993

Frankenthaler’s retrospective of prints opens at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and travels in the US and to Japan.

2001

Frankenthaler is awarded the United States National Medal of the Arts.

2004–10

Health issues impair Frankenthaler’s ability to continue painting. Numerous exhibitions of her work are held in the US and internationally.

2011

Frankenthaler dies on December 27 in Darien at the age of 83.

 

Helen Frankenthaler
Frankenthaler in her Third Avenue studio with Alassio (1960, in progress), New York, 1960.
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. Photograph by Walter Silver
© The New York Public Library / Art Resource, New York. Artwork
© 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP