Early Life and Education
Helen Frankenthaler was a New Yorker. She was born in Manhattan on December 12, 1928. Her father was Alfred Frankenthaler, a respected New York State Supreme Court judge. Her mother, Martha (Lowenstein), had emigrated with her family from Germany to the United States shortly after she was born. Her two sisters, Marjorie and Gloria, were six and five years older, respectively. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and progressive intellectual family that encouraged all three daughters to prepare themselves for professional careers. Her nephew is the artist/photographer Clifford Ross.
Frankenthaler studied at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont. She met Clement Greenberg in 1950 and had a five-year relationship with him. She was later married to fellow artist Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), from 1958 until they divorced in 1971. She has two stepdaughters, Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell. Both born of wealthy parents, the pair was known as "the golden couple" and noted for their lavish entertaining. She married Stephen M. DuBrul, Jr., an investment banker who served the Ford administration, in 1994.
Frankenthaler had been on the faculty of Hunter College.
Read more about this topic: Helen Frankenthaler
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.”
—Henry Reed (1914–1986)
“The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough.... He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)
“A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)