Artworks

Helen Frankenthaler American: 1928 – 2011 A towering figure among the second generation of post-war American abstract painters, and one of modernism’s pre-eminent colourists, Helen Frankenthaler is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from gestural Abstract Expressionist painting to Colour Field painting. With her breakthrough painting, Mountains and Sea, 1952 (in the collection of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), Frankenthaler pioneered a method of applying turpentine-thinned paint directly on to unprimed canvas, which she referred to as a ‘soak stain’ technique. With its floating fields of translucent colour, the painting was a motivating work for Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and other Colour Field painters who emerged during the 1960s. Frankenthaler experimented tirelessly throughout her career, creating ceramics, sculpture and tapestry in addition to paintings on canvas and paper. Her embrace and exploration of woodblock printing, a medium in which she became especially accomplished, yielded a body of work that proved as influential to printmaking as her ‘soak stain’ method was to painting. Winter Figure with Black Overhead, 1959, was created during a period in which Frankenthaler deliberately returned to the gestural improvisation of Abstract Expressionism as a way of moving her practice forward. In this imposing work, graphic – at times calligraphic – and painterly elements combine to evoke both the season and putative figure of the title. Rich with intimations of process, it is nonetheless a work that transcends the merely procedural. As Frankenthaler said: ‘A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image.’