“Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective,”[1] at the Museum of Modern Art this summer, was an event, heralded by ample color spreads in the glossy magazines and a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. There were interviews in Lear’s, in New York Woman, on the Today show, and in the new British art magazine Modern Painters. The show was thoroughly dissected by the New York papers, the art magazines, and the out-of-town press. Frankenthaler was declared—with the cautious proviso “since the deaths of Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Nevelson”—to be “the country’s most prominent female artist.” (Since Frankenthaler was born a good thirty years after either of her long-lived predecessors, the accolade could even be interpreted as a tribute to her work rather than to her endurance.)

Clearly Frankenthaler is news, and for those of us who believe that she is not only “the country’s most prominent female artist” but one of the best painters around, anywhere, period, the ballyhoo surrounding the show seemed appropriate. Quite apart from anything else, the show was the first in New York devoted to an overview of Frankenthaler’s canvases since the Whitney Museum’s retrospective in 1969. (In between, however, there have been, among other shows, a splendid survey of her work of the 1950s at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, a travelling print retrospective, and “Frankenthaler on Paper: 1949-1984,” at the Guggenheim Museum and across the country.) The show at MOMA, restricted to forty paintings,