In 1950s New York, The Irascibles was the name given to a group of Abstract Expressionists who protested a “monster” exhibit at the Met, “American Paintings Today-1950.” Eighteen artists signed the boycott, including Rothko, Motherwell, de Kooning and Pollock. Thus began the creation of the image of strong, hard-drinking, wild and trailblazing male artists. Unfortunately, as so often in history, women were left out except as a support to men –Lee Krasner with Pollock, and Elaine De Kooning with Willem. Fortunately, thanks in part to their famous husbands, some of these women were able to make names for themselves as artists. But the road has never been easy for women, in any field.
That same year, on foot Helen Frankenthaleran educated, wealthy young woman. Because she was beautiful and had the money to train as an artist and rent a large studio in New York, she caught the eye of powerful art critics. Clement Greenberg. During their nearly six years together, they often went to see exhibitions. In 1956, she separated from Greenberg and traveled to Europe, visiting museums. Her work became freer and more self-assured – not surprising, since she was no longer under his thinking eye. She got married Robert Motherwell in 1958, one of the Irascibles and a famous artist in his own right. She stayed with him for 13 years, and throughout that time, they each maintained their own individual studios. During this period, in 1960, she received her first retrospective at the Jewish Museum. She was 31.
Being beautiful and rich certainly opened many doors for Frankenthaler, but that’s not the real story. Because she had family money, she could be independent, work in her own studio on her own terms, get the training she felt she needed, and arrive in New York when the art scene was buzzing with energy and innovation. We also have to consider what the men in her life took from her—not just as an attractive appendage, but because she was extremely intelligent and an independent thinker. Like many women, she was a force to be reckoned with. She never stopped experimenting, taking huge risks with her work that resulted in innovative techniques, such as her stained-glass paintings (large-scale, untouched canvases created by pouring paint directly onto a surface). This was just the beginning. She also made prints, woodblocks and sculptures, and even designed sets and costumes for the Royal Ballet. For 50 years she has never worked in series, always pushing herself to find new ways of creating. She is a pioneer in the art world.
Fast forward to the present. two years ago, Kunstmuseum Basel hired only the second female director in more than 350 years– and the first American to direct it. (Institutions like the Met and MoMA have yet to have a female director. There are almost no other Americans running a major European art institution, although a number of Europeans run major American ones.) I recently had a long conversation with the director Elena Filipović– an art historian by training, she has now been on the job for two years. Previously, she served as director of the Kunsthalle Basel for nearly 10 years, another important institution in the city dedicated to young and emerging artists. “Helen Frankenthaler” is the first major show by an American artist that Filipovic has programmed at the museum. In the months before starting the job, she had negotiated Frankenthaler’s gift Head of the river (1962) from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation to the museum. “It’s a bold, monumental example of Frankenthaler’s greatness, and it stands alongside the major works of abstraction made by men who for a long time were alone in the room,” said Filipovic. “His arrival at the Kunstmuseum proved to be a catalyst for the artist’s first institutional exhibition in all of Switzerland, and the largest in Europe. Helen Frankenthaler is one of those artists whose influence is everywhere, and yet whose central place in the history of post-war abstraction is still not fully acknowledged, let alone in Europe.”
The exhibition showcases 52 years of Frankenthaler’s work. An important addition is a group of paintings she made in response to other artists – Derain, Mondrian, Fabritius, Marie Laurencin, Titian AND Hiroshige. The museum was able to borrow these specific pieces to hang next to Frankenthaler’s, giving viewers a deeper look at just how special she was. She did not copy her sources verbatim, but captured their mood, their color, their essential feeling. with Édouard ManetS ‘ Fish (quiet word)for example, she explores the work through blocks of its color, a black cutout for the knife, a white wave in the center for the fish, and a block with red bricks above it for the copper pot. The contrast of scale is also striking – her large canvases next to the smaller referenced paintings. John Elderfieldwho wrote the major monograph on her work, calls these responses “paraphrasing.” Karen Wilkina friend of Frankenthaler’s, has written an excellent and insightful essay in the museum’s catalog; she had planned with Frankenthaler to organize a show of these very comparisons before the artist died.
Discussing Frankenthaler’s “privilege” with Filipovic, she said: “At a time when women were expected to be lovers of women without professional aspirations or, at best, secretaries, Frankenthaler’s financial independence gave her the freedom to devote herself fully to painting. This is not an insignificant detail. But the story that is sometimes told is that the most beautiful came from Greenge. The influential critic of his generation – and later married, the artist Robert Motherwell, downplays her real artistic achievements, instead of acknowledging the misogyny embedded in the culture of the time, Frankenthaler used her family’s financial support to give herself the freedom to take artistic risks rather than produce her paintings Life: the assumption that the flow of intellect and power went only one way challenge it.”
Filipovic thinks that for many people who are not yet familiar with Frankenthaler’s work, this exhibition will be a revelation. “Many visitors may wonder: Why haven’t we seen more of her in European collections? Why is the history of Abstract Expressionism so often taught primarily through its male protagonists? Women artists were not simply sidelined; many were fundamentally undervalued. Why has it taken so long to rethink the way art history is taught and never represented neutrally in a public institution. It is constructed through markets, collectors, critics and historical narratives An existing story, but Frankenthaler does more than expand the narrative of Abstract Expressionism—she fundamentally recasts it.
Exhibition catalogue, designed by Verena Gerlach and published by Deutscher Kunstverlag, is beautifully illustrated and contains excellent essays by the curator Anita Haldemann and Karen Wilkin. The front and back covers reproduce the Frankenthaler colors April mood (1974) and when unfolded, the covers stretch nearly 3.5 feet—a fitting reminder of the artist’s scale. Frankenthaler’s paintings are often large: 60, 70, 80 inches wide, measuring 14 feet by nearly 15 feet. She had things to say and she said them for over 50 years, over and over. She has long held the image of a privileged artist, but she is something much more complex and deserves much more attention. It is significant that Kunstmuseum Basel is paying attention to it now; 2028 will mark the 100th anniversary of Frankenthaler’s birth, and there will be major shows at SFMOMA, the Whitney and the National Gallery in Washington, followed by a tour. Finally.
“Helen Frankenthaler” is at the Kunstmuseum Basel until August 23, 2026.
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