Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler is an American post-painterly abstraction artist. Born in New York City, her work is influenced by Jackson Pollock with whom she also was involved in the 1946-1960 abstract art movement.

Sourced

"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—well, she did this and then she did that, 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."

• • Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85

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• Consciously and unconsciously the artist allows what must happen to happen.

• Betty and her gallery helped construct the center of the art world. She was one of the last of her breed.
  • On Gallerist Betty Parsons

• It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language.
  • After seeing several of the most major Jackson Pollock paintings from 1950.