Born in New York City on December 12, 1928, Helen Frankenthaler was educated in private schools and at Bennington College, where she studied art and from which she graduated in 1949. She then settled in New York and began painting. Further study at the Art Students╒ League and under Hans Hoffman, together with the particular influence of Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and others of the burgeoning abstract expressionist school, formed her work. She developed her own approach to painting, however, imitative of none of her teachers. Viewers of her exhibits, first in a Bennington show in New York City in 1950 and the next year in a ╥New Talent Show╙ and the ╥Ninth Street Show,╙ quickly detected in her work a daring, unprogrammatic willingness to treat each painting as a new task with its own peculiar problems and rewards. She also conveyed to the canvas a variety of emotional states and moods keyed to colors and to lyrical or dramatic composition. Her experiments in stains and other media and in ╥action painting╙ highlighted her openness to various modes and her determination to evolve a personal style.
Annual shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and later at the Emmerich Gallery spread Frankenthaler╒s reputation, as did special shows in various cities in America and abroad, notably Paris (1961, 1963), Milan (1962), London (1964, 1969), Berlin (1969), and Montreal (1971). She was one of four U.S. painters represented at the Venice Biennale in 1966. She was represented regularly in major shows at the Whitney Museum, where she had a solo retrospective in 1969. She taught drawing and painting at various times at New York University, Hunter College, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale and Princeton, and she was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes for her paintings. Despite the trend in New York galleries in the 1980s of showing, almost exclusively, the work of new, young artists, Frankenthaler has continued to have one-woman shows regularly at the AndrÄ Emmerich Gallery in New York and the Knoedler Gallery in London. The Guggenheim Museum exhibited her work in an individual show in 1985, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York launched a retrospective in 1989.
