=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

She was born into a rich family. Her father was a New York State Supreme Court judge. But it wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Daddy died of cancer when she was eleven. Inconsolable, Helen Frankenthaler suffered intense migraines and depression for the next four years.

She went to a lot of exclusive private schools. She met and started sleeping with the influential art critic/theorist Clement Greenberg, who introduced her to artists like deKooning, Pollock, and Kline. She studied under Hans Hoffmann. It's good to be rich. She was on her way.

She said: You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognize it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.

She married Robert Motherwell, another artist from a well-to-do family. They were enviously—and sarcastically—referred to as “The Golden Couple” by their less financially fortunate fellow artists. It's damn good to be rich. They stayed married for thirteen years.

She pioneered the “soak-stain” technique. She painted on the floor like Pollock. But she came up with the notion of thinning her paints with turpentine so that they’d soak into unprimed canvas. …Eureka! She invented the “color-field” school of painting.

She said: One really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.

She managed to make a name for herself in the super-macho world of abstract expressionist painters who were then dominating the art-world of the 1950s.

She took a lot of inspiration from landscapes. Her  first breakthrough painting was “Mountains and Sea.” She was only twenty-four when she painted it.

Even though her paintings seem to have a clear relationship to abstraction, Frankenthaler claimed to feel a closer affinity to surrealism because she worked with shape and color in a psychologically associative fashion.

Her work has often been criticized as too lyrical, too romantic, too meditative, too decorative, too pretty—all code words for too "feminine." It is now axiomatic that to be  truly "relevant" art will necessarily be disjointed, harsh, dark, brutal and "beautiful" in spite of itself, as a function of it's aggressive, unapologetic, in-your-face ugliness. Or it will be an art either so minimal as to be practically non-existent—or it will be, in fact, non-existent and be known, if at all, only as a "concept" in your mind. Because of these assumptions, Frankenthaler's work has come to seem somewhat reactionary and consequently become unfashionable. There is, however, evidence that a major reassessment of her oeuvre is on the horizon.

Frankenthaler grew rather disappointingly conservative as she grew older and a mutating art world began to leave her behind. She wondered aloud if art grants were being given to controversial artists not so much on merit, but on the outrageousness of their experimentation.  This critique coming from the same woman who once said: “There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”

Like many people with inconsistent views, she may have had a point on both scores. Never forget Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

At 83, Frankenthaler died on December 27, 2011 after the proverbial “long illness.”

Today, her work retains a clarity and a freshness that perhaps surpasses all of the painters of her time, negotiating a successful compromise between several major trends in art, most evidently between minimalism and abstraction.