SHORT TAKES : 5 Named to Academy of Arts

Helen Frankenthaler, considered by many to be the nation’s preeminent woman artist, has been elected to the 50-member American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters along with four writers to fill the chairs of five “immortals” who have died in the past year, it was announced Thursday.

Author William Styron, secretary of the honor society that is chartered by Congress, said Frankenthaler will occupy the chair formerly held by sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Frankenthaler, 61, an abstract painter who pioneered color-staining techniques, was given a retrospective this year at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Styron also announced the election of novelist William Gaddis, 67, to the chair of the late composer Virgil Thomson, literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, 73, to the chair of the late novelist Mary McCarthy, literary critic Alfred Kazin, 74, to the chair of the late author Malcolm Cowley, and poet-playwright James Merrill, 63, to the chair of the late poet Robert Penn Warren.