Fierce Poise
Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York
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Narrated by:
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Alison Fraser
About this listen
A National Book Critics Circle Finalist
One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year
A dazzling biography of one of the 20th century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York
“The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some 70 years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.” (Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women)
At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. 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, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew - and left her mark on - the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions.
Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments - from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg - comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world.
Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.
©2021 Alexander Nemerov (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Neither conventional biography nor arm’s-length critical appraisal, Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise shines a light on Helen Frankenthaler’s early artistic breakthrough by blending both forms.... A thrillingly alive account of a woman unapologetically pursuing her own vision in an era and a milieu largely defined by men.” (Vogue)
“Nemerov is emphatic about not neglecting the political side of art. He has written extensively about art that is embedded in social life, and the power of art to prod the conscience and change the world. But in this book he wrestles with another kind of art - art that is deeply self-conscious, inward, sensitive and committed to extending a tradition of art as a sacred calling. The ability to convey the particularity of a sensation, at a precise moment, isn’t political in the usual sense, but it can be deeply ethical, reminding another person of a simple fact that is profoundly hard to process: that other conscious beings exist.... For a long time, art critics and historians have worked to recover the darker truths obfuscated by the glamour and mystique of America at the mid-century, including the world in which Frankenthaler built her career. Next up is redeeming the lightness from that darkness, without indulging the old myths or perpetuating the old inequities. Nemerov believes that is possible. He has written a book that shows us how it can be done.” (Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post)
“Nemerov, a professor of art history at Stanford, explores the abstract expressionist’s career between 1950 and 1960, starting each of the book’s 11 chapters on an important day in her life.... The result is the illumination of not only how central Frankenthaler was to the artistic movement that’s often defined by the likes of Pollock and Rothko, but how she’s also one of the most compelling personalities in contemporary art history.” (WSJ Magazine)
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Story
In Montparnasse begins on the eve of the First World War and ends with the 1936 unveiling of Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. As those extraordinary years unfolded, the Surrealists found ever more innovative ways of exploring the interior life, and asking new questions about how to define art. In Montparnasse recounts how this artistic revolution came to be amidst the salons and cafés of that vibrant neighborhood.
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Great Second of Two Books
- By Anonymous User on 10-26-19
By: Sue Roe
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What Would Frida Do?
- A Guide to Living Boldly
- By: Arianna Davis
- Narrated by: Marisa Blake
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Revered as much for her fierce spirit as she is for her art, Frida Kahlo stands today as a brazen symbol of daring creativity. She was a woman ahead of her time whose paintings have earned her generations of admirers around the globe. But perhaps her greatest work of art was her own life. What Would Frida Do? explores the feminist icon's signature style, outspoken politics, and boldness in love and art, even in the face of pain and heartbreak.
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I was excited
- By Anonymous User on 01-14-21
By: Arianna Davis
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Anonymous User on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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Isak Dinesen
- The Life of a Storyteller
- By: Judith Thurman
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 21 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Isak Dinesen earned international fame for Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa, and other stories that skillfully combine elements of fable, social conflict, and psychological drama. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Yet the story of her life - her travels, affairs, and friendships - remains the greatest story of all.
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over-written
- By Anonymous User on 10-19-18
By: Judith Thurman
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Warhol
- By: Blake Gopnik
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead
- Length: 43 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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To this day, mention the name “Andy Warhol” to almost anyone and you’ll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol’s name and dominated the public’s image of him, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multifaceted than that. In Warhol, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions.
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Explaining an Enigma
- By Anonymous User on 05-05-20
By: Blake Gopnik
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The Mark on the Wall
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Teresa Gallagher
- Length: 21 mins
- Unabridged
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This is a story from the Classic Women's Short Stories collection.
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The best story ever written
- By Anonymous User on 10-12-24
By: Virginia Woolf
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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Possessed
- The Life of Joan Crawford
- By: Donald Spoto
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author Donald Spoto has brilliantly explored the lives and careers of numerous Hollywood stars and entertainment icons. In Possessed, his subject is the inimitable Joan Crawford, one of the most electrifying divas of the Golden Age of American film. A more thorough, revealing, and sympathetic portrait of the often maligned movie star - most notably lambasted, perhaps, in the scandalous best seller, Mommie Dearest - Possessed is a fascinating study of the real Joan Crawford, a remarkable actress, businesswoman, mother, and lover.
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An concise assessment of Joan's life
- By Anonymous User on 10-17-20
By: Donald Spoto
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Everybody Thought We Were Crazy
- Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
- By: Mark Rozzo
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles in the 1960s: riots in Watts and on the Sunset Strip, wild weekends in Malibu, late nights at The Daisy discotheque, openings at the Ferus Gallery, and the convergence of pop art, rock and roll, and the New Hollywood. At the center of it all, one inspired, improbable, and highly combustible couple—Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward—lived out the emblematic love story of ’60s L.A.
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Wonderful!
- By Anonymous User on 06-07-22
By: Mark Rozzo
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Broken Glass
- Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece
- By: Alex Beam
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time—unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began spending weekends together, talking philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and, of course, architecture over wine-soaked picnic lunches.
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Tedious and disappointing
- By Anonymous User on 02-03-23
By: Alex Beam
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The Queens of Animation
- The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History
- By: Nathalia Holt
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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From Snow White to Moana, from Pinocchio to Frozen, the animated films of Walt Disney Studios have moved and entertained millions. But few fans know that behind these groundbreaking features was an incredibly influential group of women who fought for respect in an often ruthless male-dominated industry and who have slipped under the radar for decades.
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Buy this book!! Truly Inspiring and fascinating!
- By Anonymous User on 02-05-20
By: Nathalia Holt
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Tom and Jack
- The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
- By: Henry Adams
- Narrated by: Wayne Thompson
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock.
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I suggest you READ, not listen...
- By Anonymous User on 07-01-16
By: Henry Adams
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Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
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Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
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You Say to Brick
- The Life of Louis Kahn
- By: Wendy Lesser
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Born to a Jewish family in Estonia in 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia; by the time of his death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last 15 years of his life.
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A book about architect needs pictures
- By Kristin Olson-garewal on 10-15-17
By: Wendy Lesser
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The Unfinished Palazzo
- By: Judith Mackrell
- Narrated by: Julia Franklin
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Venier family waned, and the project was left abandoned and unfinished. Yet in the early 20th century, it attracted three fascinating women: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim.
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Nostalgia At Its Best
- By Anonymous User on 01-09-18
By: Judith Mackrell