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Review: "Fierce Poise," on Helen Frankenthaler and the 1950s


By Alexander Nemerov
Penguin Press: 288 pages, $28
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The cover of “Fierce Poise,” a new biography of the painter Helen Frankenthaler, features a famous photograph of the artist, shot by Gordon Parks, from a 1957 article in Life magazine on “Woman Artists in Ascendance.” Frankenthaler appears “pouty, confident, and serene,” writes Alexander Nemerov, her latest biographer. “She likely understood nearly as well as Parks how to craft an image exactly for the magazine’s massive target audience.”
Frankenthaler is also the cover girl for Mary Gabriel’s brilliant group biography of the women of Abstract Expressionism, 2018’s “Ninth Street Women” (soon to be adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino for Amazon). Gifted with privilege and connections and unashamed to use them, Frankenthaler put her image to work and was criticized ....

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