Born in 1928 in New York, NY
Died December 27, 2011

Frankenthaler was trained at the Dalton School, received her BA in 1949 from Bennington College, and studied with Wallace Harrison and Hans Hofmann. She very quickly became a highly recognized and influential member of the second generation New York School and, as one of very few female members of that school, held her own with the men in terms of scale, gesture and productivity.

Frankenthaler was awarded the First prize for painting in the Paris Biennale de Paris in 1959 and has received numerous other awards and honors. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

She showed regularly in galleries and museums around the world over six decades (early 1950s until 2011). Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. Additional one-person exhibitions include The Jewish Museum (1960), Whitney Museum (1969), Metropolitan Museum (1973), the Seattle Art Museum (1975), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1986), and the National Gallery of American Art, (1993).

Frankenthaler taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and New York universities.

She was married to fellow artist Robert Motherwell from 1958 until they divorced in 1971.

When Helen Frankenthaler died in December 2011, she had established herself as a significant and innovative painter and printmaker. Frankenthaler's prints combine the artist's trademark use of rich colors, interesting papers and the ambiguous abstract imagery which propelled her to the forefront of the New York School in the 1950s, and later the Color Field painters in the 1960s.

In the six prints from the Tales of Genji series, Frankenthaler has worked with master printers at Tyler Graphics to create intricately carved wood blocks printed in as many as 53 transparent colors on 47 x 42 inch sheets. The transparent inks reveal radiant colors when printed on specially tinted handmade papers. Titled after an 11th c. romance considered to be the world's first novel, Frankenthaler's series is inspired by the watercolor-like effects of the numerous Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts that have been created in response to this passionate tale.

In these over-sized images, Frankenthaler has distilled the best of her stained imagery, her erratic linear elements and her mastery over some difficult color combinations. Her mark making is often random but never arbitrary. Nuances in color and delicate changes in texture has always been an important aspect of Frankenthaler's working methods. Whether in her paintings, works on paper, or as seen in these prints, her spontaneous efforts are held in check by her rigorous demands for beauty, clarity, and an ambiguous expressive relation to the natural world.

When printed on cotton handmade papers, the many thin veils of color, which are applied layer upon layer, achieve a depth of painterly resonance. The grain of the wood stands out in many of the prints, while in others the fluid look of her early stained painting is revealed. This delicate layering of imagery allows Frankenthaler's especially poetic use of color and form to shine.
As Ken Tyler describes: "Since the goal (of the Genji prints) was to make a woodcut with watercolor effects, we employed a hydraulic press to squeeze the inked blocks into the thick and absorbent cotton handmade paper, purposefully causing certain colors to bleed."