Love & Passion Quote by Helen Frankenthaler

In Helen Frankenthaler’s mouth, “The question of sex will take care of itself” lands like a brushstroke that refuses to stay inside the lines. She’s not offering a cozy “time heals all” platitude; she’s deflating an entire cultural obsession with classification. Frankenthaler came up in a mid-century art world that loved to praise women as exceptions, muses, or anomalies while treating “serious” painting as a male baseline. To be asked, implicitly or explicitly, to account for her sex was to be nudged off the canvas and into sociology.

The line’s quiet provocation is its verb choice: “will take care of itself” suggests inevitability, even boredom. Sex, in her view, is not the central riddle of the work; it’s a variable that resolves once the work exists in public, once the paint has dried and the argument shifts from identity to impact. There’s a subtle power move here: she’s refusing to litigate her legitimacy on the interviewer’s terms. It’s a dismissal that masquerades as patience.

Context matters: Frankenthaler’s stain technique and expansive color fields helped reshape postwar abstraction, a space often narrated as a heroic, masculine arena. Her remark reads as a tactic for survival and sovereignty: don’t perform gender; make paintings so undeniable that the discourse has to catch up. The subtext isn’t that sex is irrelevant. It’s that the art is not a referendum on it.