Word: helens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Abstract Heart. With earlier recognition, Helen might also have claimed another distinction. Anybody can see that abstract art is very pretty and decorative. What many were slow to understand is how any painting which does not have recognizable figures or objects in it can have any relation to reality, feeling or soul. Admittedly, this quality of feeling is difficult to derive from the impersonal, sometimes almost machine-tooled canvases of Louis or Noland. It is certainly there, but hidden, just as men make it a point of honor not to cry and to keep a stiff upper...
...Helen Frankenthaler's painting career began in the ninth and tenth grades of Manhattan's ultrachic, ultra-strict Brearley School. Her father, New York State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthaler, had died a few years before, leaving behind a beautiful widow, a sizable estate and three daughters. Helen was the youngest, and she soon found herself in "a very bad state, suffering a real childish sense of life and death." She found that only her painting class gave her "a sense of losing myself." Brearley girls sketched nudes from life and painted still-life compositions in oils. Helen...
Miracle and Myth. In the eyes of Motherwell, who admittedly is a fond partisan, there are three reasons for her new renown. The first is her own talents. "Helen is a miracle," he says, "in that her art is very complete and at the same time abstract-her work is full of people, animals, flowers, and so on-but very highly transformed, so that only a very sophisticated person can see it." The second has to do with the fact that she is a woman, and "the myth is that when a woman is an artist, she tends to become...
...heiress of it. She might also claim to be something of a pioneer. In 1952, when she was only 23, she developed her "stain technique" as an extension of Jackson Pollock's method of skeining swirls of glossy Duco enamel onto a canvas spread upon the floor. Helen thinned her paint with turpentine and poured it onto the unprimed canvas, so that the paint sank in. The marks of the pouring or brush disappeared, canvas and color became one and the same. The result was so remarkable that when Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland came up from Washington...
Empty but Outspoken. When they returned to Manhattan, Helen would try to distill her impressions of the real landscapes into abstract canvases structured not by the external reality, but in terms of an internal harmony. "The landscapes were the discipline, the abstracts were the freedom and the joy. Though I enjoyed the discipline, one was confined within a tradition that was déjà vu. For me, just about everything has been said about landscapes, but I don't think everything has been said in terms of colors and shapes...