Desire Is the Theme of All Life: Helen Frankenthaler in 1950s New York with Alexander Nemerov

At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back to New York City, where she grew up. By the decade’s end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, in an art world dominated by male painters such as Jackson Pollock, she made some of the most daring, head-turning abstract paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman. In this talk, art historian Alexander Nemerov, chair of the Art and Art History Department at Stanford and author of Fierce Poise, a new biography of Frankenthaler, will explore the painting that set the young artist on her way, Mountains and Sea, which she painted in 1952 when she was twenty-three years old. About the Speaker: Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and the department chair. Every fall he teaches Art 1B, “How to Look at Art and Why,” which is one of the most popular humanities courses at Stanford. Named one of Stanford’s top ten professors by the Stanford Daily, he has also been called “Stanford’s art history preacher.” He is the author of many books on American and European art and culture and has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. Recently he was featured in The Price of Everything, an HBO documentary about the art world. His new book, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, published by Penguin, is out this spring.