Revisiting the Edgeless and All-Encompassing Art of Helen Frankenthaler
For sixty-plus years, Helen Frankenthaler made paintings, prints, woodcuts and sculptures. “My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates… not nature per se,” she said, “but a feeling…” Her works are feeling, just as nature is, at once deep, mystical, impenetrable, and ineffable. How to pin down the feeling of a sunrise or one of Frankenthaler’s large paintings—they invoke feelings that are deep in, yet essential. Frankenthaler had the unique ability to reach into herself and consistently pull out onto the surface, into the light, representations of essence.
Looking at her paintings based on compositions by artists she admired, like Degas, Matisse, Rembrandt, Manet and others, they clearly show her bonding with the essence of these masters’ works rather than copying them. Her painting, The Widow of Fantin Latour (1988), alongside Degas’ Victoria Dubourg (1868-69), is as if she is painting Victoria’s spirit, filmy and viscous, emanating from her body. Her Madame Matisse (1983) references Matisse’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1913). His is a solid, physical portrait, whereas Frankenthaler seems to capture his wife’s essence using his same colors yet hers are like ectoplasm, floating joy.
This is energy contained in color and form and yet set free, different from Pollack or Gorky whom she admired. Their pieces can feel tormented, fractured, searching and sometimes forced. Her work, on the other hand, feels allowed—the inside free to form upward onto her surfaces, out of her. She was not afraid to allow beauty, tenderness, flow, grace and explosion to be expressed. This is not to compare her to other artists, for all great art is without comparison, but to articulate the many sensations that arise when standing in front of her work. She absorbs you. Her paintings take you into her world, to a place where there is no representation. Where intellect, emotion, thoughts and the spiritual mystical are all absorbed into sensation.
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Frankenthaler’s pictures are mysteries. Her work asks, not demands. It invites, not attacks. In this way, it feels female, unlike artworks created by Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, who felt, understandably, a need to compete with men and so painted edgy and bold. Frankenthaler’s art feels edgeless, as if she could engulf you in her liquid forms and color. Here is an artist without containment—a rare feat accomplished by a woman creating in a male art world dominated by the likes of Pollack and de Kooning, as well as male critics with stark, intellectual and biased opinions. She was able, somehow, to stand outside and be herself. Her work remained, for over sixty years, uniquely hers through Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Post Modernism and Neo-Expressionism. All those isms that seem useless in describing work that the art critic, Dore Ashton, said “colonized emptiness.”
It is shocking and probably not surprising that such a powerful, important artist had her last full-scale retrospective in 1989 at MoMA, showing just 40 works. We are fortunate that today there are two exhibits on view in Italy: “Helen Frankenthaler: Painting on Paper, 1990–2002,” which features eighteen large-scale paintings on paper from the later part of her career, many never shown before, and closes on November 23, and “Helen Frankenthaler: Dipingere senza regole (Painting without rules)” at Palazzo Strozzi, which runs through January 26 and is the largest retrospective ever organized in Italy of her work. In that exhibit, her paintings, drawings and other pieces are shown in dialogue with artworks by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, David Smith, Anthony Caro and Anne Truitt—artists who were her friends and influences.
“Over the past eleven years, the Foundation, led by Elizabeth Smith, has been an incredible steward, deepening the understanding and appreciation of Frankenthaler’s work,” Jason Ysenburg, director of Gagosian since 2014 and the gallery’s liaison for the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and Estate, told Observer. In partnership with Gagosian, it has spearheaded a comprehensive re-examination of her legacy, working on scholarly initiatives such as the publication of the monograph and collaborating on a series of exhibitions internationally that underscore this artist’s pivotal role in 20th-century abstraction.
She was uncompromising, according to Ysenburg, and threw away a lot of her work, always seeking new challenges. “She was articulate and forthright,” he added. “She valued her own insight into the work. When collaborating on her shows, I always look for how much she challenges herself in the work. With her, that idea is pushed to the limit. The exhibitions in Italy show her ambition, her technical ability, her ability to use paper the way she did with paint, which is very difficult. There is a spiritual calmness in her work. And the ability to evoke emotions in the viewer. She is a worker. She’s complicated. An innovator. She is a revelation.”
Ysenburg also had this to say about last year’s “Helen Frankenthaler: Drawing within Nature: Paintings from the 1990s” at Gagosian’s West 24th Street space: “Larry thought that these old, entitled painters were not relevant anymore. But then he said about her work in this show, ‘These paintings are amazing. Why had I never paid attention to them before?’” At the opening, there were 1,300 people, and one thousand of them had not even been born when Frankenthaler died. Eighty-five percent of the work sold. Next up, in 2028, the National Gallery will organize a major retrospective of her work that will travel across the United States.
For 2024, curator John Elderfield has revised and expanded his monograph, Frankenthaler, first published in 1989. He has known Frankenthaler since 1976 when he curated his first exhibition at MoMA, and the 469-page volume is a testament to her life and work, with 300 full-color reproductions, over 100 photographs and comparative illustrations and an in-depth look at her career. A perfect legacy. Ysenburg said of the book, “John gives us a greater understanding of Frankenthaler. He is showing us her work differently, making her relevant. The book is a fountain of knowledge.”
Who was Helen Frankenthaler?
Born in 1928 in Manhattan, Frankenthaler studied painting at Bennington College with Paul Feeley, and later with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown. In 1951, she had her first solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Only 23 years old, she dated the severe and powerful art critic Clement Greenberg, who introduced her to Pollock and other famous artists. She was beautiful as well as intelligent, and perhaps these two traits gave her the courage and stamina to look beyond what was popular to create the soak-stain paintings that made her famous.
Her soak-stain technique was like watercolor, except she worked on unsized/oversized unprimed canvases, first with oil and later with acrylics. She used dense concentrations of color alternating with diluted color, and a lot of
Working at the emergence of Color Field Abstraction, Frankenthaler stepped outside what was popular and known to open up new possibilities beyond. After seeing Mountains and Sea for the first time, painter Morris Louis said that this was “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”
In 1958, she married Robert Motherwell, and during the 13 years they were together, they hosted lavish dinners and parties. Friends were extremely important to Frankenthaler throughout her life. She maintained close friendships with the sculptor David Smith who mentored her in those early years, the artist Anthony Caro and the artist and writer Anne Truitt. In one 1991 letter to Truitt, Frankenthaler wrote, “I love you and think of you. I realize how much (despite our physical and symbolic differences of inner and outer landscapes) how much we ‘need’ and count on each other.” She wrote many other letters to friends throughout her life and loved those friends deeply, too. She also traveled extensively in Europe studying the great masters. Europe was a constant presence throughout her life.
In addition to creating her monumental paintings, Frankenthaler made welded steel sculptures. Her printmaking was innovative and masterful. She created silkscreens, lithographs, pochoir, etchings, aquatints and more. Sometimes she turned over canvases and worked on the other side. “I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do,” she said. “The whole business of spotting; the small area of color in a big canvas; how edges meet; how accidents are controlled; all this fascinates me, though it is often where I am most facile and most seducible by my own talent.”
Renaissance, 1971, measures over 13 feet across; Chairman of the Board, 1971, more than 16 feet; Nature Abhors a Vacuum, 1973, more than 9 feet–and these are only a few of her large paintings. To paint so large, to follow her intuition, to maintain lifelong deep friendships, to travel and seriously study art from the past and present, to read extensively, to be admired and lauded—in all this, she remained true and connected to her inner self. Her paintings are a testament to her dedication to the work through a lifetime of study, risk-taking and experimentation, with a sophistication in handling, understanding and developing her materials, all mixed in with a generosity of spirit that is rare.
Years ago, I saw an exhibition of her work with a number of large-scale paintings. In one gallery, there were only three huge paintings on three walls, giving the work the space they demanded. In front of one, two Buddhist monks stood side by side with their matching red robes and shaved heads. They stood close to one another, not moving for a long while. They did not talk, did not move—held suspended like their years of silent meditation had taught them. Indeed, meditation had taught them how to see her paintings.
“Arrive where you started,” Frankenthaler once said. Which is what she did all her life, her intuition leading the way.