Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Helen Frankenthaler on her birthday 🎂
📷 Gordon Parks, 1956
"If any artist can give us aid and comfort Helen Frankenthaler can, with her great splashes of soft colour on huge square canvases."
- Nigel Gosling

Helen Frankenthaler by Chris Felver
Stamford CT, 1991
"Her paintings, like Pollock’s, create their own imaginary space, mightier somehow than the gallery itself, as if they don’t stop at the edges of the canvas but are glimpses of one infinite work of art."
- Jonathan Jones

In 1969 Ernst Haas took a series of photographs of Helen Frankenthaler creating a painting in her New York studio. These rival Martha Holmes's 1949 Life photos of Jackson Pollock. Action!
There are 46 images on the Haas Estate website, here:
ernst-haas.com/helen-frankent…

Robert Motherwell & Helen Frankenthaler. A lovely portrait of a special couple, by Hans Namuth for Vogue 1964

Helen Frankenthaler by Alexander Liberman, 1964
@smithsonian @ArchivesAmerArt
"Helen seemed to speak on behalf of some energy in the world, to be the representative of a force that occasionally alights in all of us but that had chosen to live within her."
- Alexander Nemerov

Helen Frankenthaler in her East 83rd Street studio
📷 Alexander Liberman, 1974

Helen Frankenthaler dressed as Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror at the Beaux Arts Ball, New York
📷 Walter Sanders for Life, 1950

Here's Picasso's Girl before a Mirror, 1932
@MuseumModernArt

Helen Frankenthaler by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 1981
@MFAH
"My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates and not nature per se, but a feeling. And the feeling of an order that is more associated with nature."

Helen Frankenthaler by Hans Namuth, 1987
@smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

Highly recommended:
Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel
amzn.to/2ZWS0XK
Lee Krasner
Elaine de Kooning
Grace Hartigan
Joan Mitchell
Helen Frankenthaler
"Five Painters & the Movement That Changed Modern Art"

One of my favourite Helen Frankenthaler portraits is this John Marmaras shot from 1972. In her studio on East Eighty Third Street, painting "What we really are, we really ought to be". Against the walls: "I Am Your Blue Mountain", "Filming", "Spirits of Wine".

I also really enjoyed this book:
Reading Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings 1962-1987
amzn.to/2HdyFa3

Jackson Pollock, unidentified child, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner at the beach on Long Island, 1952
@smithsonian @ArchivesAmerArt

Helen Frankenthaler by Arnold Newman
Provincetown, Mass., 1963
"It's light in the painting that makes it work."

I love this shot;
Helen Frankenthaler with David Smith in her studio.
📷 Burt Glinn, NY, 1957

Helen Frankenthaler in her studio with Anthony Caro.
📷 André Emmerich, 1982
"She made a group of steel sculptures in my London studio. It was a revelation to witness her at work making decisions with certainty in a medium new to her. She knew when to walk away from a piece."

Helen Frankenthaler, Heart of London Map, 1972
"She did not agonize and had complete confidence in her 'take'. As a result, her work has a breathtaking freshness."
- Anthony Caro

There are many great photographs in the @smithsonian @ArchivesAmerArt, like this contact sheet with portrait shots of Helen Frankenthaler by Andre Emmerich, from 1990.

I never get tired of posting this 1957 Burt Glinn photograph of Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler & Grace Hartigan. Today it's in honour of Frankenthaler's birthday.