Description:

What is the relationship between an artwork and its maker? Can we confidently link the two, or do they diverge in meaning and intention? In this keynote lecture, Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University, Department of Art & Art History) will reflect on these enduring questions by focusing on Divertimento, a lithograph by Helen Frankenthaler, and its related working proofs—recently acquired by The Block Museum as part of a major gift from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

Presented in conjunction with Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper, the lecture invites audiences to consider how chance, abstraction, and artistic identity intersect in Frankenthaler’s work and legacy. Drawing from his acclaimed biography Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, Nemerov will offer a reflection on what we mean when we speak of “art” and “artist.”

Programs are open to all, on a first-come first-served basis. RSVPs are not required, but are appreciated.

Alexander Nemerov is the author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, named one of Vogue’s books of 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography. Most recently he is the author of The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, praised by the novelist Annie Proulx as “one of the richest books ever to come my way—deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender.” Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford.

Photo credit: Suszi Lurie McFadden.

Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper is curated by Stephanie S.E. Lee, 2024–25 Art History Graduate Fellow and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, at The Block Museum of Art. Generous support for the exhibition was provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The exhibition is supported in part by The Alumnae of Northwestern University. The Graduate Fellow is generously supported by The Graduate School (TGS), Northwestern University.

This program is generously supported by a grant from The Alumnae of Northwestern University.