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Lot Essay
"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image... that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute."
--Helen Frankenthaler
Tournament's beauty lies within Frankenthaler's innate ability to orchestrate a complex composition through an understanding of her chosen medium and her drive to defy convention. Tournament was painted just a short year after her first visit to Arizona and the American West. As with Georgia O'Keefe and Agnes Martin, the western landscape opened up Frankenthaler's palette; and her canvases in their intensity became an extension of the natural beauty she was experiencing. It was in 1976 and 1977 that Frankenthaler developed an intense all-over surface that no longer involved areas of raw canvas worked into the composition. Her layering techniques matured to the point where her thinned veiling of multiple washes of contrasting color took on a degree of natural beauty, matching the best of Morris Louis's classic Veil paintings. There is a halation visible at the upper edge of Tournament's central form that makes it extremely difficult to deconstruct how the painting was made, which color was applied first and which last, a hallmark of Frankenthaler's best works. Frankenthaler has pushed her own physical and aesthetic limitations to create Tournament, a completely enveloping field of color shimmering at each edge and producing a new experience with each and every viewing.
1969: Abstract and expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler tips the contents of a can of paint onto a canvas on the floor. She is the inventor of a technique whereby unprimed and absorbent canvas is soaked with paint giving a translucent effect. Photo by Ernst Haas/Ernst Haas/Getty Images.
The Bascom Center. PHoto by Jonathan Hillyer.
--Helen Frankenthaler
Tournament's beauty lies within Frankenthaler's innate ability to orchestrate a complex composition through an understanding of her chosen medium and her drive to defy convention. Tournament was painted just a short year after her first visit to Arizona and the American West. As with Georgia O'Keefe and Agnes Martin, the western landscape opened up Frankenthaler's palette; and her canvases in their intensity became an extension of the natural beauty she was experiencing. It was in 1976 and 1977 that Frankenthaler developed an intense all-over surface that no longer involved areas of raw canvas worked into the composition. Her layering techniques matured to the point where her thinned veiling of multiple washes of contrasting color took on a degree of natural beauty, matching the best of Morris Louis's classic Veil paintings. There is a halation visible at the upper edge of Tournament's central form that makes it extremely difficult to deconstruct how the painting was made, which color was applied first and which last, a hallmark of Frankenthaler's best works. Frankenthaler has pushed her own physical and aesthetic limitations to create Tournament, a completely enveloping field of color shimmering at each edge and producing a new experience with each and every viewing.
1969: Abstract and expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler tips the contents of a can of paint onto a canvas on the floor. She is the inventor of a technique whereby unprimed and absorbent canvas is soaked with paint giving a translucent effect. Photo by Ernst Haas/Ernst Haas/Getty Images.
The Bascom Center. PHoto by Jonathan Hillyer.