Helen Frankenthaler: On Art and the Politics of Emancipation

After the conservative Congress of the United States went into an uproar following the National Endowment for the Arts’ financial support for photographs of transgressive acts by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, someone decided to write a rather vague opinion piece denouncing the positions of everyone involved. In 1989, in an article for The New York Times titled “Did We Spawn an Arts Monster?” this person reluctantly admits “I, for one, would not want to support the two artists mentioned, but once supported, we must allow them to be shown.” They go on, “We must not smother the expression of art anymore than we should suppress or annihilate protests and parades, all part of our unique and precious democracy.” 

Most artists will be rejected from patrons and publishers at some point in their career—but not many can claim to be denounced by the benefactor that supported their work before they were famous. Much less someone now etched into popular culture forever, like Mapplethorpe. This person continues in their critique, “But there are other issues in these particular cases. It is heartbreaking both as an artist, and as a taxpayer(!) for me to make these remarks, and as a painter on the council I find myself in a bind.” They weren’t just a patron of art, but a well-known artist themselves. “I myself find the council—the recommendations of the panels and the grants given—of increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art along the way, in the guise of endorsing experimentation?” 

The distinction between art that is true and art that is experimental, is a question—particularly when posed by people in positions of financial or societal privilege—I’ve found frustrating for a long time. Experimentation is inherent in any work of art; that fact seems obvious to me. Even in the most “serious” piece, an artist is playing with the tools at their disposal, their feelings, training, and perception of the world. Revolution as a political project has always been assisted by the work of artists. Leon Trotsky, who wrote his Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art in Mexico with the assistance of Diego Rivera and André Breton, points to this paradox when revolutionary impulses of artists come into direct conflict with the conservative institutions that regulate the art market. In this manifesto that he wrote during World War II, he mentions, “In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible,” a prescient declaration for us in 2025, when all artists are finding ourselves at odds about how to stop the increasing rise of fascism worldwide. Trotsky goes on to declare, “True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time—true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society” (the italics are his). In other words, good art combats the alienation and fragmentation that the modern capitalistic society imposes on the human body, in the hopes of silencing the expression of our interior lives. To commit to conjuring emotional depth that resists simple categorization, is, in of itself, a revolutionary act. It also can be thought of as “experimental,” for experimentation of the self is the condition for the creation of such a work. Remember, to experiment simply means, “to try out a new idea, procedure, or activity.” The other reason why I try to resist the use of the word “experimental” as a way of describing any work of contemporary art is that it’s classist. It’s a categorization that serves the tastes of elite arts institutions interested in diminishing work that expressly points to the fragmentation of a marginalized self as a natural byproduct of modern society. Rather than embracing that all art is in some way in pursuit of the search for the self, the categorization of “experimental” is placed on particular works that point to the fraying edges, the seams, the harsh and punishing nature of the neoliberal capitalist project and the forms of its oppression—in other words, art that, in its form and content, probably challenges the point of view of its audience. Or, at least, the perspectives of art’s gatekeepers: the patrons, gallerists, museums, institutions, curators, publishers, and grant committees. This rupture caused within the viewer is one of the intentions of such work—and yet, those who claim allegiance to art from the past, sometimes scoff at its value. What those who do fail to realize, is that every movement of art now canonized in art history was once also “experimental” and in search of locating pressure points to relieve art from the chains of the past. 

So who was this person, who with a few words denounced young artists interested in photographing those living on the margins of society? This person who wasn’t forced to pour salt on a wound during a moment when artists were being pilloried by a puritanical government, but who chose to do this of their own volition. When looking into the background of this person, their work as a painter, it’s even more bewildering. 

Why is the inventor of a radical painting technique bullying other artists in the public sphere?

Helen Frankenthaler and Her Art Career

Her name, incidentally, was Helen Frankenthaler. She grew up on the Upper East Side in New York City to an affluent family. She lived a charmed life on Park Avenue—but in many ways, it was full of tragedy. Her father died of cancer when she was eleven years old, and for her entire teenage years she was plagued by periods of intense depression and migraines. She studied at prestigious private schools throughout her whole life (both Dalton and Brearley in New York City), and attended Bennington College for university. By the time she graduated, she had begun to make paintings that she’ll later dismiss as “college Cubism.” These works were informed by the tastes of her professors: the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, the critic Kenneth Burke, and the painter Paul Feeley.

Soon after she graduated from college, she moved back in with her mother in New York City. Early on in 1950, she was asked to curate a show of paintings by Bennington alumnus, and she included her own work in the exhibition. She invited Clement Greenberg to the show, the critic who had helped to establish the reputation of Jackson Pollock. He came to the exhibition, disparaged her work—and they began a five year relationship. This put her in contact with artists from the New York School including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock himself. These artists inspired Frankenthaler—she felt called to join their artistic movement. She soon remembered a habit of hers from childhood: as a kid she would often fill the bathroom sink with cold water, pour her mother’s red nail polish into it, and watch the color twist through the water and create abstract shapes. 

Why not follow that same impulse with a canvas?

In 1952, she arrived at her studio and placed a large sheet of canvas on the floor. She sketched some shapes onto it with charcoal and took some oil paints and watered them down to a thinner consistency—before pouring them onto her canvas. She applied pastel colors carefully, creating loose shapes that flowed in and out of each other and over the borders of the charcoal. She later recalled that the images on the canvas resembled some watercolor paintings she had made during a vacation to Nova Scotia, but these were more abstract, loose. She titled this painting “Mountains and Sea.” 

It marked the beginning of her career. All of her following paintings more or less used this same method of applying paint to the canvas, which she called “soak-stain technique”—though she worked with acrylic paints instead of oils during the second half of her life. 

Only a few years after “Mountains and Sea,” her mother died by jumping out of a window. The strand of beauty and grief that characterized both her life and her paintings is worthy of critical attention. This, in my mind, explains her persistent attention to detail, to the ferocity of feeling that exists in her dense, abstract, and compelling works of art. The amount of pain she experienced might also explain why she once told an interviewer for The New York Times in 1989 of her famous love of beauty: “What concerns me when I work is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is—did I make a beautiful picture?” By her own admission, she forever remained a lover of calm and control, someone committed to making work that first and foremost, challenged darkness by placing it outside of the frame. Whether she intentionally meant to keep darkness beyond the edges of her paintings or painting itself served as a form of moving through her own inner torment is impossible to answer, as she passed away in 2011 at the age of 83. 

Her legacy is widely contested, both by her friends and by those who considered her too conventional. After all, once she developed her soak-stain technique, she never evolved as an artist. She remained a steady practitioner of her own style, increasingly making money from her art as she grew older—taking up positions in powerful committees, such as the one for the National Endowment for the Arts. 

She was, if it’s possible, that rare person who is both an innovator and a conservative.

The painter Robert Motherwell noted that ”An artistic personality and a life personality often have no connection,” and while I disagree, he also stated that “In Helen’s case, the controlling part of her is not part of the artistic personality.” In my mind, to be a controlling person means to also fundamentally understand what it means to lose control—to know how to stop and release yourself, even just slightly, in the midst of traversing that spectrum between taut and loose. Control, to me, seems like the hallmark of Frankenthaler’s work. Her skill is rooted in her ability, through paint, to loosen the boundaries between the world we encounter day to day in its material specificities and the dreamscapes that emerge when we release ourselves from them. 

While the creation of Frankenthaler’s paintings relied on spontaneity, she never stated any affinity with art’s potential for political emancipation. She admired Pollock’s paintings for their “originality,” but she was never concerned with challenging social expectations or norms, beyond her desire to carve a lane for herself as an artist. In fact, by her own admission, she mentioned that while her friends discouraged her from it, she visited Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office during his presidency and didn’t regret it because it had been “a great party.”  

The Paradox of Personal Taste

This is the part of the essay where I admit that while I disagree with her politics, I adore Frankenthaler’s paintings. Their texture draws me in, makes me feel as if I’m standing at the periphery of some revelation. That sensation of freefall feels particularly visceral when I look at her painting, “Moveable Blue,” where a figure stands on a floating orange platform of some kind, behind them a swirl of purple and yellow with a background in a wash of blue. The figure, as I see it, stands at an edge, a harbor, a space—a threshold. Above a sea, connected to land from which to depart in any direction. The landing-place of so many from now and eons past. We all understand the stakes of converging at such a place. Whether in mourning for a past or in search of a new beginning, we gather in spaces such as these, to reflect on the blues we just can’t seem to let go of. In other words, the sensation of hope is, in of itself, a feeling in proximity to danger.

This state of immobility in the midst of crashing waves is one frequently evoked by the color blue. Not just because the metaphor of wading through rough waters is often called upon, but also because its pigment is known to strike our mind in moments of ecstasy and melancholy. In her famous ode to the color, Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes in the 23rd section:

Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as “a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note.” Goethe himself describes the period as one in which “a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question.” Goethe is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment. Think of filmmaker Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma as he was going blind and dying of AIDS, a death he also forecast on film as disappearing into a “blue screen.” Or of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Colour during the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of stomach cancer. He knew he was dying; he could have chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the sun. He chose to write about color. About color and pain. Much of this writing is urgent, opaque, and uncharacteristically boring. “That which I am writing about so tediously, may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit,” he wrote.

What Nelson brings together in this passage is that all three of these wildly different thinkers and artists yearn for blue in the last moments of their lives as if it’s the representation of desire, of the eradication of pain. They need blue. This is significant in the context of Frankenthaler precisely because her paintings are all color. Often they feature blue, though not always. Yet no matter their composition, the subject of the paintings is color. In chase of itself, ricocheting against digressions, textures, objects, shapes. Yearning for twists, blends, shifts in dimensionality and thickness, her canvases overflow with color’s desire for itself. Almost as if Frankenthaler, through her brush, is hungry to let go of control over the stiff borderlines she erected between herself and her emotions, her world and its social mores. 

Is a painting characterized by the desire for its own subject not, in some way, concerned with emancipation? 

Earlier, I noted that Frankenthaler’s friend Motherwell said that her personality and her art bore no relation to each other—even though to me they seem entirely connected. He also stated that, “Her lyricism as an artist comes from a great personal inner liberation.” I’m astonished by how he thinks someone could be liberated from within but not without—as if liberation is a synonym for stasis, for inner peace. When in fact, emancipation is an ever-evolving project of self-discovery, not a fixed destination. Claiming that someone else is free inside is a slippery slope anyway—what are its terms and how can that ever be confirmed? 

Perhaps what distinguishes Frankenthaler’s paintings is their sense of danger, of their proximity to clarity. While not revolutionary in thought, perhaps the closest she got to touching liberation was the sensation that overtook her when she abandoned control over her own body and submerged herself in color. 

In her astounding work Women in Dark Times, the feminist critic Jacqueline Rose writes of Marion Milner’s book On Not Being Able to Paint, and its conviction in the fight for the freedom of artistic expression, as one linked to how the unconscious mind rules over the hand of a painter when in the midst of working with color in free association. As Rose tells it, for Milner “entering the realm of painting means plunging – a word she repeatedly uses – into one’s psychic roots, but not, she insists, nostalgically.” Painting, in other words, is a form of giving body to the excavation of pain. “We are not talking about restoring one’s first, immortal loves.” Rose notes, for Milner “Painting goes deeper, ‘right back to the stage before one had a love to lose.’” In other words, it is a form of traversing the boundaries of the self—not for the sake of canonizing struggle, but an action in defiance of the socially-imposed mores of quotidian life. To return to somewhere raw, undefined, before power was linked to control. 

For Frankenthaler, who lost her parents quite young and who was always bourgeois—the omnipotence of order was unwavering. She might not have been interested in changing her cultural standing or resisting the world order she was born into. Her notion of what it meant to be “original” was probably linked more to how we might think of the word “novel”—as one connected to naivety, to surprise—not to the reconstitution of political life. But regardless of her artistic intentions, I still can look at her paintings and wish to rip apart my life, our contemporary political landscape, institutional judgments over what it means for art to be “experimental,” or, as Milner says in On Not Being Able to Paint, advocate for the “free reciprocal interplay of differences that are confronting each other with equal rights to be different, with equal rights to their own destiny.” 

Frankenthaler might not have wanted to join the revolution, but that doesn’t mean her paintings can’t encourage others to jump in.

The Threat to Artistic Freedom

On Friday, May 2, most of the pre-eminent literary organizations in the United States received an email from the National Endowment of the Arts stating that their grants for this fiscal year had been terminated. The reason given was that their work did not “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.” The following Monday, the literary staff of the National Endowment for the Arts announced that their last day of work would be May 30. The entire literary world is in an uproar, scrambling to address the best way to move forward after the nation’s largest arts granting organization was shuttered by a dictatorial president. Depending on the size of an organization and their financial status, all publications have announced their continued commitment to supporting the arts, begun fundraisers in order to sustain their work, and/or announced their imminent closure. For anyone paying even the slightest modicum of attention to Trump and his regime’s antics, their continued attacks on the most marginalized communities, their fear mongering against immigrants, their attacks on the trans community and the working class, this shift to attacking the free expression of arts and arts organizations is entirely unsurprising. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook—there’s no reason to confront this with anything but coldhearted acceptance. But the acceptance of reality must never be equated with resignation and surrender. We must never forget that the only acceptable art for this administration’s “standards” is blatant propaganda. As artists coalesce around various means of resisting this dictatorship (which is what we should all be calling it by now), what’s important is to continue to support the arts organizations that have lost their funding but also continue to insist on keeping alive discourse about the expansion of what it means to be human, to embrace every expression of it—regardless of whether or not it was supported by an arts institution in the first place.

We are confronted with a strange opportunity to not only embrace the importance of the arts, but to contest the categories of genre that are so often imposed on artists and their work by the art market. We must not continue to relegate so-called “experimental” work to the sidelines. The zines, the drawings on napkins, the poets in readings at the bookshops, the publishers that rely entirely on Venmo payments—they are equally, if not more deserving, of funding than pre-eminent arts organizations. Donations, the use of public and/or private spaces, access to online platforms where their work can be shared, critical attention, all of it—must be offered up to them and their art as if they are worthy of equal respect than those who previously received the most prestigious grants in the country. Those scenes, where artists gather to upend tradition in order to make art closer to their own experiences and share their work with others, are the places where revolutions begin. They are historically targeted by administrations too, but often in secret—unlike the established organizations that were just confronted with the end of their federal funds. Those institutions are, in many ways, responsible for perpetuating the myth of “experimentation” as a category for art in order to alienate such work that points to the fraying seams of late-stage capitalism in both form and content. This is not in bad faith, necessarily—but the continued use of the word “experimental” relegates such work that may not be appealing to the bourgeois class as less significant or deserving of financial support. We must find some other word, set aside other elitist practices that marginalize artists who come from the most vulnerable communities, and across all of the arts industries unite against the horrific actions of the current president. 

There is no doubt that the current administration of the United States is looting the government so money can flow to their own pockets. By the most recent estimation, at the moment that I’m writing this essay, $24,609,700.00 worth of NEA grants have been terminated. The government is using this as bait for their political supporters—declaring that cuts to the arts are a form of “eliminating taxpayer waste” and aligning U.S. artists with the “values of the country.” But those of us who are paying attention know that this is a smokescreen. The U.S. Department of Defense has requested $849.8 billion for this coming fiscal year, a serious increase from the budget of the year before. These cuts to the arts are pennies in comparison with the military budget, yet eliminating support for the arts is being hailed as some kind of financial victory. All of this is happening, of course, as the president gets rich off of crypto and makes deals with foreign governments—all in order to stay out of jail. 

To borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase, thinking is “another mode of moving in the world in freedom.” The fascist totalitarian project is rooted in opposition to independent critical thought and in this, Frankenthaler would agree with me. As she wrote in that infamous retort in The New York Times—“We must not smother the expression of art anymore than we should suppress or annihilate protests and parades, all part of our unique and precious democracy.” Regardless of whether or not she would claim to be in pursuit of emancipation or have made, as Trotsky characterized it, “true art,” she influenced me into wanting to build alternative worlds—and wouldn’t stop me from taking my beliefs to the streets. Perhaps, art can become true years after it was made and its creator passes away. Perhaps, art becomes revolutionary once it encourages someone else to experiment.

“Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules” is on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao through Sept. 28, 2025.

Featured image: Star Gazing, 1989. Acrylic on canvas
181.6 x 365.8 cm. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York
© 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP. Photo: Tim Pyle, courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York.