Helen Frankenthaler, dressed as Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, at the Beaux Arts Ball, New York City, 1950 © Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Discussed in this essay:
Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, by Alexander Nemerov. Penguin Press. 288 pages. $28.
Imagine, if you will, that it’s the year 1990, and you are flipping through the magazine Art & Antiques. (Why you are doing this, I don’t know—maybe you’re an art collector? Just imagine it.) You come across a photograph of a middle-aged white woman in a lemon-yellow sweater and low wedges. She’s perched inside some kind of gigantic wheeled frame, dark eyes cast to the side, laughing at a private joke. Cans of paint, buckets, and brushes,…
