ART-PRESENTATION: Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler was introduced early in her career to major artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, whom she later married. She invented the “soak-stain” technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint onto canvas, producing luminous color washes that appeared to merge with the canvas. Her breakthrough gave rise to Color Field Painting, marked by airy compositions that celebrated the joys of pure color and gave an entirely new look and feel to the surface of the canvas.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
In the exhibition “Helen Frankenthaler: After Abstract Expressionism, 1959–1962” are on presentation 14 paintings and 2 works on paper by Helen Frankenthaler that reveal her deliberate return to the gestural improvisation of Abstract Expressionism, as a way of moving her practice forward. The works from 1959-60 are characterized by imposing scale and vigorously expressive brushwork. They include the mural-like, freely painted “First Creatures” (1959), an abstract, indeterminate landscape exhibited here for the first time, and “Mediterranean Thoughts” (1960), in which Frankenthaler’s looping skeins of poured paint create partitions of varying sizes, many filled, or almost filled, with several different colors, leaving very little exposed canvas. By 196-62, Frankenthaler had moved on to make paintings that were quieter and more calligraphic. Coinciding with her first forays into printmaking, graphic paintings like “Italian Beach” (1960) and “May Scene” (1961) employ an economy of line not commonly seen in her earlier works. In 1952 Frankenthaler created “Mountains and Sea”, a seminal, breakthrough painting of American abstraction. Pioneering the stain-painting technique, she poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor, working from all sides to create floating fields of translucent color. “Mountains and Sea” was immediately influential for the artists who formed the Color Field school of painting, notable among them Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Thereafter, Frankenthaler remained a defining force in the development of American painting. Throughout her long career, Frankenthaler experimented tirelessly, and, in addition to unique paintings on canvas and paper, she worked in a wide range of media, including ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and especially printmaking. Hers was a significant voice in the mid-century “print renaissance” among American abstract painters, and she is particularly renowned for her woodcuts. She continued working productively through the opening years of this century.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, Duration: 9/6-16/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.gagosian.com
