Frankenthaler, Helen

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

She graduates from Dalton School, where she was taught art by the renowned Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo.

She attends Bennington College in Vermont and studies painting with Paul Feeley.

Frankenthaler makes her first trip to Europe.

She graduates and returns to New York, where she has a studio. She pursued graduate courses at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Columbia University, including a series with the American art historian Meyer Shapiro.

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.

The Jackson Pollock exhibition held at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York will be crucial for her later artistic development.

Frankenthaler is the youngest out of seventy-two artists showing in the 9^th 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.

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

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.

n 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.

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

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

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.

Frankenthaler starts teaching fine arts at Hunter College (CUNY) in New York through 1961. She 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.

She participates in the V São Paulo Biennial, in documenta II in Kassel, and wins the First Prize in painting at the Première Biennale de Paris.

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.

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

She participates in the group exhibition American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

She begins experimenting with acrylic paints. The Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan presents her first solo exhibition in Italy.

She visits Anne Truitt’s first solo show at the André Emmerich Gallery. Shortly after, the artists begin a correspondence that will last decades.

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

She teaches fine arts at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Smith dies in a car crash in May. Frankenthaler writes, “We’ll never recover from the shock of losing him. We miss him terribly.”

She begins teaching fine arts at the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University, New Haven. 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.

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.

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

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

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 that Caro acquired.

She teaches a seminar at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and travels to Rome to work in a printmaking workshop. She produces her first woodcut, East and Beyond, at ULAE. She also completes a commission for a ceramic tile mural installed at the North Central Bronx Hospital in New York in 1974.

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She receives the Creative Artist Laureate Award from the American Jewish Congress.

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

An exhibition of ceramic tiles titled, Helen Frankenthaler: Tiles. which Frankenthaler made at Bennington Potters in 1973 opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

 

The American director, Perry Miller Adato, dedicates the documentary Frankenthaler: Toward a New Climate to the artist. After spending her last summers in Shippan Point, Stamford, Connecticut, she buys a house and establishes her second place of work there. She lives and works between New York and Shippan Point.

She participates in the group exhibition The New York School: Four Decades at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Frankenthaler designs sets and costumes for Michael Corder’s ballet Number Three.

She is appointed a member of the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts. Frankenthaler: Works on Paper 1949–1984 opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and travels throughout the US and Canada. The Royal Ballet premieres the work Number Three at the Royal Opera House in London.

She is awarded the New York City Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture. She teaches at the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts, New Mexico.

She visits Barcelona and works at the printmaking workshop of Ediciones Polígrafa, where she produces a series of monotypes.

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.

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, Texas. The monograph of the artist by John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, is published.

She begins a summer teaching residency at the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts in New Mexico. She serves as Vice-Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She leaves her New York studio after 21 years. Her new studio on Saddle Rock Road at Shippan Point becomes her primary painting space. She teaches for a third summer at the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts.

She is appointed to the Advisory Committee to the Board of the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts, New Mexico. She begins to show her work with Knoedler & Company, New York. She meets businessman Stephen M. DuBrul in July.

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

She receives the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association of New York. She marries DuBrul.

Her work is included in the group exhibition Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Frankenthaler: A Catalogue Raisonné, Prints 1961–1994 by Pegram Harrison is published.

Frankenthaler leaves her residence and studio in Shippan Point and moves to Darien, Connecticut.

 

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.

She is awarded the United States National Medal of the Arts. She is elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and an Academician of the National Academy of Design.

Frankenthaler is awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. She exhibits her paintings on paper at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida, which later travels to the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. She participates in Four Originals: Cassatt, O’Keeffe, Nevelson, Frankenthaler at the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York.

She is awarded by the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in celebration of its 40th anniversary.

Frankenthaler receives the Gold Medal of Honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, on the occasion of its bicentennial. She is inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame and participates in The Shape of Color: Excursions in Color Field Art, 1950–2005 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.

She receives the first of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Award in Art from Purchase College, State University of New York.

Frankenthaler is appointed Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She passes away at her home in Darien at the age of 83.