Helen Frankenthaler's Spaced Out Orbit (1973) on display at the Portland Art Museum

Helen Frankenthaler, one of the most important painters of the twentieth century has died at age 83. I consider her be the most important artist of what her onetime paramour Clement Greenberg dubbed "Post Painterly Abstraction." She was the inventor of the stained canvas technique that other artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland used to remove any separation between color and the canvas. What's more she differed from those who followed because she continuously used a poetic approach to abstraction that was tellingly rooted to real experiences... I see this as a strength as she makes the otherwise VERY MACHO movement much more varied than it is given credit.

I'd also argue that without Frankenthaler there would be no Clement Greenberg. As a couple the two would tour the latest exhibitions all the while debating the merits of the work. In some ways Greenberg wanted to be like her, a highborn Jewish intellectual. He came from more modest means and she was his partner at the moment of his apotheosis when he singled out Jackson Pollock.

Portland has a special relationship to Frankenthaler because it is home to the Clement Greenberg Collection. It is doubly telling because Frankenthaler's Spaced Out Orbit (on view at the Portland Art Museum) seems to be a commentary on her's and Greenberg's by then concluded romance but still inextricably tied relationship. When that painting appeared in her 1989 MoMA retrospective the lenders name was kept private... only when it entered PAM's collection in 2000 did I learn its true significance.

I have an even more personal relationship to the artist (whom I met several times) in that one of her mature abstractions graced the top floor of Illinois Wesleyan's Sheehan Library. Wesleyan is my Alma Mater and I spent hours contemplating her work. When I went to grad school my respect for her work remained undiminished. In a way she is my artistic Helen of Troy, farewell launcher of a thousand ships...