Nemerov, the chair of the art and art history department at Stanford University, confines himself to the period of Frankenthaler’s youth. His book opens in 1950 with a costume party where Frankenthaler, then unknown in the art world, is dressed as Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, and ends with her 1960 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, when she was thirty-one years old. This was a dazzlingly productive era with obvious appeal for the scholar and reader. It was the decade in which Frankenthaler pioneered a daring and influential process of 'soaking' canvases with diluted paint poured directly from a can, combining these pools of color with loose drawings that remained tethered to reality even as they eschewed representation.

Fierce Poise focuses on the artist in an unconventional way: It covers the years 1950-60 in 11 chapters, each jumping off a specific date during one of those years. The resulting book is lively but short, skimming the surface of Frankenthaler’s work.

Alexander Nemerov never pretends he’s an objective observer in his masterful new biography.

In Fierce Poise, his slim, thoughtful, and admiring book charting Frankenthaler’s first decade as an artist, art historian Alexander Nemerov describes how early she found her creative path..

This book serves as a corrective to those dismissals. It’s part of an insistence by many of today’s art historians that attention must be paid to female artists and artists of color who have been denied respect and recognition for their achievements. The book also greatly enriches our knowledge of a critically important decade in American art..

In recent years it seems to have become standard practice for biographers to insert themselves in the story. Mr. Nemerov is no exception. Do book editors push writers in this direction? Do they see it as a way of heating up potentially chilly subject matter? Mr. Nemerov may not have needed any persuading; he has often aimed to give his writing a strong personal slant—a bit of essayistic pizzazz. He’s not wrong to feel that his family background gives him a privileged view of the mid-20th-century cultural milieu, but I’m not sure that he knows what to do with the experiences he’s had.

... sharp and vibrant.

The passionate inwardness typical of Frankenthaler’s work throughout her long working life first declares itself in her untrammeled works of the 1950s, providing, it could be argued, reason enough to concentrate on this decade of her long working life. Nonetheless, I was perplexed by the narrowness of Nemerov’s focus.

Nemerov is a beautiful writer, and his evocation of Frankenthaler’s groundbreaking artistic process (she invented Color Field painting) is a delight. Yet his structural conceit hobbles the book, and his paternalistic attitude toward Frankenthaler undermines both his gifts and hers.

While some may disagree with the author’s assumption about audience appreciation of Frankenthaler’s oeuvre, this book will appeal to those interested in the developmental years of a 1950s artist, and her creative process..

[A] vibrant, sympathetic portrait.

Art historian Nemerov chose not to write a full biography of abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, a student of his father’s at Bennington College, but rather to follow her footsteps as she created her uniquely fluid, liberated, personal, and animated visual language and techniques and attained prominence in her twenties.