Helen Frankenthaler painting in 1969

Now that she has died, Helen Frankenthaler is being widely acclaimed by art critics and others, but remembered as a force for conservatives and responsible for the weakening of federal arts funding by others. In her New York Times “Critic’s Notebook“, Roberta Smith talks about Frankenthaler and John Chamberlain (who also died this week) saying each brought a, “new, unfettered approach to materials that pushed their respective mediums toward greater expressive freedom, unabashed physicality and a rough-edged, aggressively color-based beauty.”

Her husband, Jerry Saltz, tells us in his tribute in New York Magazine that, “not enough people have thought about the far-reaching accomplishments of Helen Frankenthaler, foremost inventor in the fifties of what is variously called American Color Field painting and post-painterly abstraction.”

Others, however, remember a darker side of Frankenthaler. The Los Angeles Times obituary reminds us that: “Frankenthaler did take a highly public stance during the late 1980s “culture wars” that eventually led to deep budget cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts and a ban on grants to individual artists that still persists. At the time, she was a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA’s chairman.”

“In a 1989 commentary for the New York Times, she wrote that, while ‘censorship and government interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and not part of the democratic process,’ controversial grants to Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work “of increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art … in the guise of endorsing experimentation?”