Clement Greenberg

Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrical artist who was a key figure in the second generation of post-War American abstract painters, has died at her home in Darien, Connecticut. Frankenthaler was known for creating sensitively colored abstract works using thinned washes of translucent paint that stained her raw canvases, achieving qualities similar to watercolor but often on a vast scale. If the technique forsook absolute control, it made up for it in a surprisingly delicate liveliness, as Frankenthaler made use of her great feeling for contrasts of color, opacity, shape, and tone.

Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrical artist who was a key figure in the second generation of post-War American abstract painters, has died at her home in Darien, Connecticut. Frankenthaler was known for creating sensitively colored abstract works using thinned washes of translucent paint that stained her raw canvases, achieving qualities similar to watercolor but often on a vast scale. If the technique forsook absolute control, it made up for it in a surprisingly delicate liveliness, as Frankenthaler made use of her great feeling for contrasts of color, opacity, shape, and tone.

Georges Rouault was a modernist misfit. He was a figurative artist during a period that saw abstract art gain the ascendancy. He was a religious artist at a time when almost all advanced art was avowedly secular. And he dealt in allegory during an era that came to see allegory as, in Jorge Luis Borges's bald judgment, "an aesthetic mistake. " And yet Rouault was very much at the center of the creative cauldron that was early modernism. He studied with Henri Matisse under the great symbolist Gustave Moreau in the 1890s.

NEW YORK - Stephen Mueller, a New York painter who expanded and refined the vocabulary of 1960s Color Field painting into deliriously buoyant mystical-comic works, died Sept. 16 in Manhattan. He was 63. The cause was cancer, said his sister, Debra Pendleton. Mr. Mueller's mature paintings, which took shape in the early 1990s, were cross-cultural hybrids that presaged many current concerns in abstract painting, most importantly its scant interest in being purely abstract. Mixing motifs distilled from tantric art, Indian and Persian miniatures, and Mexican ceramics and...

Brassy, visionary, and cozy. The three don't go together often, but "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," the vibrant and defiant traveling exhibition of textiles at the Museum of Fine Arts, has it all. There's the dazzle of sophisticated, syncopated design, and the fortitude of artists creating work in extreme poverty in order to keep their families warm. Isolated in a sharp loop in the Alabama River northwest of Selma, tiny Gee's Bend has been home to sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the descendants of slaves.

CAMBRIDGE--It was a very good year. In 1958, Frank Stella turned 22 and graduated from Princeton. The art world, which had been so intoxicated for a decade with the heroic swipes and drips of Abstract Expressionism, was developing a bleary-eyed hangover. It was the morning after, and all the grandstanding, the authorial egotism, and the extravagant gestures of the long night before were beginning to seem, in the light of day, a little stale. "Frank Stella 1958" at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum tears one page out of the great tome that is the history of modern art and illuminates a...

NEW YORK - Stephen Mueller, a New York painter who expanded and refined the vocabulary of 1960s Color Field painting into deliriously buoyant mystical-comic works, died Sept. 16 in Manhattan. He was 63. The cause was cancer, said his sister, Debra Pendleton. Mr. Mueller's mature paintings, which took shape in the early 1990s, were cross-cultural hybrids that presaged many current concerns in abstract painting, most importantly its scant interest in being purely abstract. Mixing motifs distilled from tantric art, Indian and Persian...

Helen Frankenthaler, the lyrical artist who was a key figure in postwar American abstract art, died yesterday at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83. A regular summer resident of the artist colony at Provincetown, she was known for creating abstract works using thin washes of translucent colored paint that soaked into her unprimed canvases, achieving qualities similar to watercolor - though often on a grand scale. If the technique, which derived from the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, forsook absolute control, it made up for it in...

NEW YORK - Hilton Kramer, whose clear, incisive style and combative temperament made him one of the most influential critics of his era, both at The New York Times, where he was the chief art critic for almost a decade, and at the New Criterion, which he edited from its founding in 1982, died early Tuesday in Harpswell, Maine. He was 84. His wife, Esta, said the cause was heart failure. He had developed a rare blood disease and had moved to an assisted living facility in Harpswell, she said.

JOHN MARIN: Modernism at Midcentury Through Oct. 10. MAINE MODERNS: Art in Seguinland, 1900-1940 Through Sept. 11. At: Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, 207-775-6148. www.portlandmuseum.org PORTLAND, Maine - Visit any or all of the seven museums on the wonderful Maine Art Museum Trail, and you can't help but notice that the same names keep reappearing. Not just local plodders and washed-up second-raters, either - I'm talking about some of the preeminent artists and photographers of American modernism: people like Marsden Hartley, Paul Strand, Gaston...

Georges Rouault was a modernist misfit. He was a figurative artist during a period that saw abstract art gain the ascendancy. He was a religious artist at a time when almost all advanced art was avowedly secular. And he dealt in allegory during an era that came to see allegory as, in Jorge Luis Borges's bald judgment, "an aesthetic mistake. " And yet Rouault was very much at the center of the creative cauldron that was early modernism. He studied with Henri Matisse under the great symbolist Gustave Moreau in the 1890s.

CAMBRIDGE--It was a very good year. In 1958, Frank Stella turned 22 and graduated from Princeton. The art world, which had been so intoxicated for a decade with the heroic swipes and drips of Abstract Expressionism, was developing a bleary-eyed hangover. It was the morning after, and all the grandstanding, the authorial egotism, and the extravagant gestures of the long night before were beginning to seem, in the light of day, a little stale. "Frank Stella 1958" at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum tears one page out of the great tome that is the history of modern art and...

Brassy, visionary, and cozy. The three don't go together often, but "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," the vibrant and defiant traveling exhibition of textiles at the Museum of Fine Arts, has it all. There's the dazzle of sophisticated, syncopated design, and the fortitude of artists creating work in extreme poverty in order to keep their families warm. Isolated in a sharp loop in the Alabama River northwest of Selma, tiny Gee's Bend has been home to sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the descendants of slaves.

DE KOONING: A Retrospective At: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Through Jan. 9. 212-708-9400. www.moma.org NEW YORK - I sometimes fantasize about seeing the work of Willem de Kooning - the subject of a blistering retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York - reflected in a funhouse mirror, a wind-whipped puddle, an oil slick. Would all the wobbles and curves in his work straighten out? The blood-bubbling colors cool down? Some glimpsed ghost of a form crystallize into a clean-lined goddess?