Helen Frankenthaler citations (46 citations)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

“For me, being a 'lady painter' was never an issue. I don't resent being a female painter. I don't exploit it. I paint.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote by John Gruen, in 'The Party's Over Now: Reminiscences of the fifties — New York's artists, writers, musicians, and their friends'; Viking Press, 1972 - ISBN 0-916366-54-5; as cited by by Grace Glueck, in 'New York Times', 2011
1970s - 1980s

“It [the Mauve-district in the U. S. ] relates to a theme which appears on-and-off, of pictures that often have one central vast shape, district, or territory; in this case, the shape itself [a square] is a play on the very shape of the canvas”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote in 1969
Quote from 'The collection', MOMA, online http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80712
1960s

“I think that for me any picture that works even if it is in the guise of pure color application, if it works, involved drawing. That is falt space on a flat surface. And for me, and I always say this, whether it's a Titian or a [Kenneth] Noland, the ones that come off work in that depth and the color perhaps it is divine and the thing that makes it work, but it is line color. If it doesn't work then it's decorative or dead or just applied colors on a surface. That's what wallpaper is. And that's the difference between the striped wallpaper and a great Noland.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about drawing in a picture
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“[.. feel interested in] Things that are not overworked, that are in essence light. In other words, the great Cezannes that are not all filled in.... while I can recognize a master piece that is heavily painted or darkly painted or painted in layers as great and sublime, it would not be my choice to hang a - [inaudible] - for five years if I could instead perhaps have a Cezanne of the kind I just described. Or a certain kind of Matisse. Or one of those large Rubens sketches, where the first breath of feeling is the picture, rather than the labor and the gift.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about 'light' paintings
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“There are three subjects I don't like discussing. My former marriage, women artists, and what I think of my contemporaries.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“It [the drip-paintings of Jackson Pollock ] was original, and it was beautiful, and it was new, and it was saying the most that could be said in painting up to that point - and it really drew me in. I was in awe of it, and I wanted to get at why.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

remembering November 1950, when Greenberg escorted her to a show of Pollock's work at the Betty Parsons Gallery
1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“We went around the room together, And he Clement Greenberg finally let me know that he thought my picture was the worst one in the show.. [she laughs]. At the same time he took my phone number.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Greenberg visited her early show early 1950, Frankenthaler was asked to organize a benefit show of paintings by Bennington alumnae
1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“Look.... the sky!... you can feel the weight of it. It's as if it were packed with snow.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“.. I think the thing that hit me most of all [at the Pollock-show, 1951] was that while I knew it was a fact, it became a physical necessity to get pictures off the easel, and therefore for me not even on a wall but the reach or fluidity of working from above down into a field [so: on the floor].... But it really registered [later] when I saw his [Pollock's] studio and he unrolled his paintings on the floor that he had painted them on. Now I was never drawn to the idea of a stick dipped in a huge can. One thing I have never liked is a drip, I mean.. it's a kind of boring accident to me, a drip. There are many accidents that are very rich that you use, but if you exploit a drip it's very boring and familiar to begin with. Drips are drips. Whereas blocks have never been drips, and haven't been, but, people don't know blocks the way they know drips. And blocks can become lines, and drips become lines in a very facile, easy way.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about Pollock's drip-painting, 1951
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“Color doesn't work unless it works in space. Color alone is just decoration - you might as well be making a shower curtain.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“I really learned how to look at art.... before 1960. And in a sense that sharpened my eye for abstract pictures. Because, it's light in the painting that makes it work. It's light in the painting that makes it work.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about the role of light
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“I mixed [early 1950's] funny shades of colors and used them but I used them because they made the drawing in my picture move. It wasn't because I was in love with the idea of putting color down. But these colors were the expedient things to use for the way I drew and I say 'draw' not meaning line, though it might have included line. But the way I drew or envisioned or made my work. And it happened that it came out stressing color. But I did not have a vision or a notion about color per se being the thing that would make me or my pictures work or operate.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about shades and drawing
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“Total abstraction was something intellectual to me. I didn't feel it; I could talk about Mondrian but it didn't occur to me to do it. [around 1950]. I saw a Dubuffet show at Pierre Matisse [the son of Henri Matisse, running an art-gallery in New York then] in the late forties and came back with a new vocabulary. Also when Baziotes won the Carnegie (1948) there was a reproduction in 'The Times'. I remember bringing it to class. It was source of bewilderment, delineated configurations that seemed to come out of Cubism. It was something new. Those were the tastes of a whole dimension that was to come, much more abstract and allover and I didn't see much more of it until I came to New York. I would go to the old Guggenheim to look at Kandinsky. I liked the early abstractions but the later ones I didn't like at all..”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Source: 1960s, Interview with Henry Geldzahler', in 'Artforum', 1965, p. 36

“Well, I think it [painting] is a life measuring stick. And I'm concerned with being myself, getting to know more and more what that is, what is possible, and what the real meaning of beauty and development is. I'm concerned with development and growth. But I am in my everyday life. I hate to feel deadly. But that does not mean that repetition or experiment isn't in the total picture of growth and development. And I think that pace and place differently at different times for each person.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about her attitude
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“I make pictures, I don't make shelters!”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

reacting on the idea of art-historian Dore Ashton of the 'colonizing emptiness' of her paintings
1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“Sometimes I think the worst thing is the current 'worldliness' of the whole [art] scene. It is the most deceptive, corrupting, transient thing, full of kicks and fun but so little to do with what it's all really about.... It has to do with our time, a desperate pact about the power of immediate-in-ness. But I feel less and less concerned with this as an issue. So what? No threat.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Source: 1960s, Interview with Henry Geldzahler', in 'Artforum', 1965, p. 38

“What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“Every so often, every artist feels: 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985 I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it as well - she did this and then she did that; there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote by Barbara Rose, in Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85
1970s - 1980s

“.. drawing, always all my learning had to do with drawing. And I never really thought about color at all. When I first started thinking about color it was sort of out of perversity. In other words, say around 1950 and '51, it occurred to me that something ugly or muddy could be a color as well as something clear and bright and a nameable, beautiful, known color.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about her years 1950-51 - reacting on the general view that her painting art was mainly focused on color and not on drawing / line
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“I'm not a suffragette... Women, as a rule, tend to tidy up pictures that don't need tidying up. How many good women artists are there?”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“After the first day there [In 1961, at the invitation of Tatyana Grosman, Frankenthaler ventured out to Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Grosman's Long Island printmaking studio, and began making lithographs for the first time] I felt no hesitation. I was very committed. All I had to do was start work on that print. It was a whole new road - and a very connected road.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote from Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Deborah Wye; The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 146 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=69050
1990s - 2000s

“I still, when I judge my own pictures (either while I'm working or after I think it's finished) determine if they work in a certain kind of space through shape or color. I think all totally abstract pictures – the best ones that really come off – Newman, Pollock, Noland – have tremendous space; perspective space despite the emphasis on flat surface. For example, in Noland a band of yellow in relation to a band of blue and one of orange can move in depth although they are married to the surface. This has become a familiar explanation, but few people really see and feel it that way.... in my work, because of color and shape a lot is read in the landscape sense..”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Source: 1960s, Interview with Henry Geldzahler', in 'Artforum', 1965, p. 37

“When I say gesture, my gesture, I mean what my mark is... It is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal, Signature....'Gesture' must appear out of necessity, not habit.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote in: 'An interview with Helen Frankenthaler', by Geldzahler, The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 67
Frankenthaler explains the difference between gesture and signature in her painting
1970s - 1980s

“I had no desire to copy Pollock. I didn't want to take a stick and dip it in a can of enamel [paint]. I needed something more liquid, watery, thinner. All my life, I have been drawn to water and translucency. I love the water; I love to swim, to watch changing seascapes. One of my favorite childhood games was to fill a sink with water and punt nail polish into to see what happened when the colors burst up the surface, merging into each other as floating, changing shapes.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote from Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 80
1990s - 2000s

“I frequently leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted [as in her painting 'Chairman of the Board', 1971].... That 'negative' space has just as active a role as the 'positive' painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote from 'The collection', MOMA, online 1 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80139
1990s - 2000s

“And then [after the break with Clem [Greenberg], c. 1955] I investigated something which is related to what I talked about in 'Number 14', [of Jackson] Pollock, a side of me that --.... Well, I always use this word and I'm always dissatisfied with it because it's not what I mean at all, but a 'surreal' side. There are two words that are applied to me often that I think are very wrong but there aren't any other words that I can think of at the moment that would --. But one is 'lyrical' and the other is 'surreal'.... I understand what's meant when that word [lyrical] is used in relation to my pictures. And I don't think 'lyric' is a put down but 'lyric' never implies the profound enough.... In other words, 'lyric' can imply light, untouched, angelic, witty. Which are marvelous qualities. But 'light' can also imply simple, which is not a marvelous quality. I don't know..”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

quote about 'surreal' / 'lyrical', after 1955
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

“It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country but didn't know the language, but had read enough and had a passionate interest, and was eager to live there, I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and master the language. [reacting on Pollock's 'Black and White' paintings show in 1951; Frankenthaler saw his painting art then for the first time in her life]”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote from Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, New York, Abrams, 1971, p. 29
1970s - 1980s

“Painting is very private and personal. There's an emotional content, but I'm more involved in the light and color and drawing of a painting. I don't set out to portray an emotion.”

Help us translate this quote

Helen Frankenthaler

Quote from an interview in 'The Post', 1972; as cited in 'Helen Frankenthaler, noted abstract painter, dies at 83' https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/helen-frankenthaler-noted-abstract-painter-dies-at-83/2011/12/27/gIQAwr0dLP_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.08d9ecdb8773, Matt Schudel, December 27, 2011
1970s - 1980s