FIERCE POISE

An art historian assesses the career of one of the 20th century’s great painters.

A “child of the Upper East Side,” youngest of three daughters of a New York State Supreme Court justice, and graduate of Bennington College, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was determined from a young age to become a painter. As a child, she would “dispense droplets of her mother’s bloodred nail polish into the [sink] basin, watching the patterns spread before draining the water and studying the stains on the white porcelain.” Inspired by Jackson Pollock, she developed a form of abstract painting whereby she thinned paint with turpentine and applied the mixture to an unprimed canvas. In this admiring, occasionally intimate biography, Nemerov focuses on “the formative decade of her life and career” by highlighting specific dates, one each from 1950 to 1960, as launching pads for a broader discussion of her work. The book has the misfortune to appear after Mary Gabriel’s magnificent Ninth Street Women, which covered Frankenthaler and four other women artists in greater detail. This volume is considerably shorter and not as rich, and the sections only tangentially related to Frankenthaler’s story—such as a passage on a friend’s acting career—could have been excised. Nemerov is at his best in his analyses of Frankenthaler’s paintings and artistic process; her romance with critic Clement Greenberg and his “insistent, demanding, pleading, hoping” behavior when she broke up with him; her marriage to abstract painter Robert Motherwell; and the backlash from some female detractors, including the ARTnews critic who wrote that Frankenthaler made “hysterical paintings” and called her a fraud. Nemerov is also cleareyed and evenhanded enough to note his subject’s tendency to throw tantrums, as when she berated a furrier for delivering her new coat to the basement of the building next door rather than to her apartment.

A fascinating but thin appreciation of a pioneering artist.