Desire Is the Theme of All Life: Helen Frankenthaler in 1950s New York with Alexander Nemerov

[@robinnelsonwicks4062]

The speaker repeatedly imposes the Feminine Ideal on Helen but in fact her actions and personal choices show that she actually was not interested in being anything other than an artist! The photo comparing JP to Helen in painting technique is interesting ....why.... because it looks like she is wearing her slippers and is comfortable in her painting and self. JP was destructive, destroying and not a thinking person. Lee was his intellectual partner. Can you say he is animalistic rather than muscular compare to Helen’s self assured style? Why does no one talk about her footwear in this photo? Now that’s how a contented woman makes artwork in her slippers or pjs!!!!

[@ignatz1967]

This comment is gibberish. Wearing slippers in a photo tells us nothing really. You’re elaborate embellishment really only tells us about you but nothing about the artist.

[@saratovanimals9054]

What a masterpiece lecture!

[@-mattwood]

This is instinct - not intellect. It is decision making not grand gestures. The psychology of art is just talk - art making is action - everything else said about it is just someone holding onto their position as an interpreter - they are just hearing themselves feel things that the artist probably never in their wildest dreams felt when moving their arm or their hand. It's tiresome listening to people make grand statements about art - it's a symptom of consumerism - build up the meanings - drive desire. It's mostly horse shit.

[@cedarraine7829]

To go inward is to go beyond the mechanism of the mind & the physicality of the body.

[@lorainejohnson6043]

I immensely enjoyed this insightful commentary and art criticism. I am a Frankenthaler fan and her paintings are timeless and affecting still today.

[@veryvalerieellis2064]

Thank you very much for the insights and your sincere support for her.

[@jeffhenderson2049]

Anyone familiar with the work of John Nicholson Colt, who also adopted Helen's style of stain painting and adopted into a style of his own?

[@gigydib1408]

I dont like any of her work!

[@lisengel2498]

And my way of experiencing the painting is a kind of “ dancing and being totally transparent to the energies of the living Now” and “ communicating a feeling of bliss” - her paintings seem to me to be a cantillation of the beauty of love, light and life.

[@KpxUrz5745]

I have devoted my entire life to painting and the study of painting and art history, --- and I cannot say that I ever liked any of Frankenthaler's work. They lack gravity, composition, good drawing, good color sense, and so on and so on...

[@lisengel2498]

I love the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and especially her sensitivity for qualities of absolute freedom and aliveness in painting. And I like The fine way of diving directly into combining looking at one painting and combining it directly with a sharing of an experience and a narrative of the process and the history.. The piece of art is primary, but sharing of the experience and process and different dimensions of history of art is an interesting aspect of communicating about art and experience of art 💜