With 'Fierce Poise,' Helen Frankenthaler Poured Beauty Onto Canvas
Abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler poured pools of highly diluted pigments onto her raw canvases. Biographer Alexander Nemerov says her paintings are "about feeling the world."
Powerful, no? And gorgeous. Helen Frankenthaler did it in 1973 — 20 years after making a painting that took Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism a step further. In 1950 she was wowed by the ropes and squiggles of paint Pollock was wrestling onto unstretched canvas on the floor of his barn.
"She realized what was possible," says Alexander Nemerov, author of the new biography,"She'd never seen that degree of freedom." She quit doing careful faux Picassos, and, Nemerov says, "she made a kind of art that hadn't been done
