Elegant Stains

“She had money, she had means, and she knew how to get ahead,” Alexander Nemerov says straight out in the introduction to his brisk, aptly elegant Helen Frankenthaler biography. And there is more than a shade of defensiveness in his account of how he came to write Fierce Poise. He never met Frankenthaler, he admits, although he easily could have. His father, the poet Howard Nemerov, was Frankenthaler’s English teacher at Bennington. Clement Greenberg (Frankenthaler’s firs