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Lot Essay
Helen Frankenthaler always painted landscapes. From the moment she broke through to her mature style in which she soaked pigment directly into the warp and weft of unprimed canvas in her celebrated Mountains and Sea in 1952, landscape has been among the principal subjects of her art. Summer Reverie, painted nearly three decades later, is filled with the same allover ethereality as she first assayed in her earlier work. An extraordinarily inventive technique, however, characterizes the present work. Combining staining with splatters, brush-like strokes, opaque aerial drops, and smears, Frankenthaler evokes a landscape of memory that immediately resonates with our own. Rose, vermillion, and orange surrounding earth tones tending toward umber conjure an early evening setting. Green is nature in all its manifestations, while shards of white overpainted by green speak to the coloristic accents that mark Frankenthaler’s style at this time.
Summer Reverie belongs to a period of monochromatic paintings executed at this time that derive from the later 1970s works in which one perceives a clear image set against a single color, as if forming figure and ground. Summer Reverie, however, merges image with ground in an optical alternation that leaves the viewer breathless. Areas of paint, too, thicken into dense patches–green in the upper register and umber in the lower–while gesso-infused white creates a milky effect. The horizontal format–landscape orientation, naturally–elicits an allover atmospheric haze. Frankenthaler’s touch is legendary, and here broad swaths of the brush moving left to right from opacity to transparency suggest the range of her paint handling in the manner of color activation. As with many of Frankenthaler’s later works, shape–that is, bounded contour–is absent. In its place color radiates, richly and generously in an open field that seems layered with pigment. The stunning Summer Reverie carries forward a comment Frankenthaler made a few years earlier: “I want more struggle in the work—I’m wresting it out, going on, doing more to each picture” (H. Frankenthaler in conversation with J. Elderfield, in Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 288). White serves to outline here a suggestion of rectilinearity, as if an internal framing edge emerged to view from the seemingly dripped vertical striation in the left register that is taken up by blobs of thicker areas of white pulled across the lower register in a multidirectional horizontal sweep, as if made by one of Gerhard Richter’s squeegies, only in this case one very much Frankenthaler’s own signature tool. There is a sense of spontaneity here that is also a signature of Frankenthaler’s approach. A cerebral and visceral painter, Frankenthaler’s Summer Reverie is a summation of her mature technique and overriding aesthetic vision—a personal evocation of the ethereality inhering in the landscape genre of which she was a master.
Summer Reverie belongs to a period of monochromatic paintings executed at this time that derive from the later 1970s works in which one perceives a clear image set against a single color, as if forming figure and ground. Summer Reverie, however, merges image with ground in an optical alternation that leaves the viewer breathless. Areas of paint, too, thicken into dense patches–green in the upper register and umber in the lower–while gesso-infused white creates a milky effect. The horizontal format–landscape orientation, naturally–elicits an allover atmospheric haze. Frankenthaler’s touch is legendary, and here broad swaths of the brush moving left to right from opacity to transparency suggest the range of her paint handling in the manner of color activation. As with many of Frankenthaler’s later works, shape–that is, bounded contour–is absent. In its place color radiates, richly and generously in an open field that seems layered with pigment. The stunning Summer Reverie carries forward a comment Frankenthaler made a few years earlier: “I want more struggle in the work—I’m wresting it out, going on, doing more to each picture” (H. Frankenthaler in conversation with J. Elderfield, in Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 288). White serves to outline here a suggestion of rectilinearity, as if an internal framing edge emerged to view from the seemingly dripped vertical striation in the left register that is taken up by blobs of thicker areas of white pulled across the lower register in a multidirectional horizontal sweep, as if made by one of Gerhard Richter’s squeegies, only in this case one very much Frankenthaler’s own signature tool. There is a sense of spontaneity here that is also a signature of Frankenthaler’s approach. A cerebral and visceral painter, Frankenthaler’s Summer Reverie is a summation of her mature technique and overriding aesthetic vision—a personal evocation of the ethereality inhering in the landscape genre of which she was a master.