Helen Frankenthaler - Awards and Legacy

Awards and Legacy

She received the National Medal of Arts in 2001. She served on the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1992.

Frankenthaler did not consider herself a feminist: she said "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." "Art was an extremely macho business," Anne Temkin, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, told NPR. "For me, there's a great deal of admiration just in the courage and the vision that she brought to what she did."

In 1953, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis saw her Mountains and Sea which, Louis said later, was a "bridge between Pollock and what was possible." On the other hand some critics called her work "merely beautiful." Grace Glueck's obituary in The New York Times summed up Frankenthaler's career:

Critics have not unanimously praised Ms. Frankenthaler’s art. Some have seen it as thin in substance, uncontrolled in method, too sweet in color and too “poetic.” But it has been far more apt to garner admirers like the critic Barbara Rose, who wrote in 1972 of Ms. Frankenthaler’s gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions."