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Lot Essay
More than any artist of the period, Helen Frankenthaler painted atmospheres, auras, or as she has said, the “effects” of things. “My pictures are full of climates,” she said, “abstract climates, and not nature per se. But a feeling. And the feeling of an order that is associated with nature” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted by J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 355). As our eyes wander over the voluptuous surface of Gateway, the variations of greens, ranging from a dark to a nearly bluish cast to a light-infused brilliancy, we feel embedded in a viridian wood, cleaved by a sudden burst of luminous rays. The range of painterly handling stretches from calm to violent, from dripped and splattered additions to essential swipes and smears of a muscularity of intention that erupts in dramatic activation of the vast horizontal surface. Side to side, zig-zagged up and down they diffuse into burnished stains that melt into the canvas support. We also notice a loosely drawn horizontally laid rectangle which seems to present an opening into recession, where cloud-like daubs, and red and magenta and orange create a landscape as if viewed in the distance. Might this subterranean scene be the “gateway” the title speaks of? Indeed, the central image seems to suggest a gridded linear structure in black overpainted by ragged-edged pinks, oranges and blues, which are violently effaced by large swipes of a wide house-paint brush loaded with whitish pigment. The ultimate “meaning” behind such a variety of gesture is at best ambiguous. As art historian John Elderfield persuasively writes, Frankenthaler’s art seems to “live in ambiguity…. each image of the world and of history, as this art sees it, is never simply one thing” (Ibid.).
Frankenthaler’s painting in the 1970s had become more painterly, which is to say, the brushstrokes as well as the stains have become more apparent as the trace of artistic interventions is revealed. Rather than pigment per se carrying the force of expression, the physical handling of the surface comes to participate in expressive meaning. Bringing forward in time lessons she had learned from the first generation painters of the New York School, among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, Frankenthaler leaves the evidence of her mark on the surface in ways both beguiling and assertive. And while the entire canvas is covered with paint, a central image in the style marked by Motherwell and de Kooning at times, brings this work closer to those artists’ image making, no matter how abstract. Tilting bands of horizontals define an image that both spreads beyond and abuts the grid, creating a tension between a voluptuous fullness and sense of containment.
By the 1970s, the period of this magnificent work, artists began returning to what has been called a “new painterliness.” Extending the gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists against whom they had rebelled with an “anti-painterliness” in the 1960s, titled by its most influential critic Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly abstraction, these artists, among them Frankenthaler, brought back into her surfaces more of this painterly quality, Frankenthaler, re-emphasized the texture of her surfaces as shown in Gateway. Using a variety of staining and over-staining techniques as here within the “proscenium arch” of the eponymous gateway and the surrounding areas, Frankenthaler has achieved a complexity not only of texture, but also of space. The infinite recession as well as the surface flatness suggests multiple planes, yet holds the surface equally, creating nearly unnamable rich coloration that seduces the eye. Frankenthaler’s extraordinary handling of light and shade is also here on view. A suggestion of modeling, of volume creates a frisson of atmospheres.
Ever since her career-defining work, Mountains and Sea, painted in 1952 in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas, Frankenthaler has been at the forefront of American painting. While she engaged with the manner in which Jackson Pollock had stained black enamel paint into raw canvas in his celebrated black and white pictures from 1952, Frankenthaler’s subtle combination of the drawn line and the color field catalyzed a new movement in American art, taken up by the likes of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, albeit to very different effect. Her career has been distinguished by an exceptional number of monographs and has been the subject of numerous museum shows, from a major mid-career survey at the Jewish Museum in 1960 to a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art followed by a European tour of her work, to a survey of her works on paper in 1985 at the Guggenheim museum, as well as the major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, curated by John Elderfield. Through the decades, Frankenthaler’s paintings have been praised for their sensuousness and beauty. Gateway is a summative work filled with great feeling, executed with a masterly technique and characterized by sumptuous textures. It is in its way also a signature work in which various grades of opticality and tactility take effect. “One carries one’s signature, self, vocabulary through life” (H. Frankenthaler quoted in D. Dreishpoon, “It’s a Matter of How You Resolve Your Doubts,” in Giving Up One’s Mark: Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s and 1970s, New York, 2014, p. 22).
Gateway is a work expressive of both its materials and its maker; its sense of flow and structure point to an artist who trusts not only her canvas and pigment, but also her intuition and experience in the present moment. It is also work of art whose extraordinary qualities were recognized by among the foremost collectors of Post-War modernist art of the period. Detroit collectors Irwin and Bethea Green included Frankenthaler in their celebrated collection of works by many of the most revered American modernists of the period, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Hans Hofmann, and Robert Motherwell, among others. Frankenthaler was deeply connected both personally and aesthetically to these artists who explored the arena of disposing pigment in large fields across the canvas. The Greens understood not only the inherent stylistic unity, but also the notion of a total environment where their collection of artworks became integral to their home.
The pictorial organization of Gateway, its banked horizontals as well as and the strong sweep from left to right are reminiscent of some of the finest depictions of Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Paul Cézanne’s vast oeuvre of this motif. Frankenthaler’s engagement with landscape is as rich and deep as Cézanne’s. This is unsurprising in that Frankenthaler would soon embark on a series of homage to great masterworks including works by Manet and Courbet, for example, in which transparency is balanced by thickened textures and drawing, as here in Gateway, is superimposed on a frieze-like horizontal format. In all of these works, nature is close at hand, strikingly rendered by the painterly hand of this extraordinary artist.
Frankenthaler’s painting in the 1970s had become more painterly, which is to say, the brushstrokes as well as the stains have become more apparent as the trace of artistic interventions is revealed. Rather than pigment per se carrying the force of expression, the physical handling of the surface comes to participate in expressive meaning. Bringing forward in time lessons she had learned from the first generation painters of the New York School, among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, Frankenthaler leaves the evidence of her mark on the surface in ways both beguiling and assertive. And while the entire canvas is covered with paint, a central image in the style marked by Motherwell and de Kooning at times, brings this work closer to those artists’ image making, no matter how abstract. Tilting bands of horizontals define an image that both spreads beyond and abuts the grid, creating a tension between a voluptuous fullness and sense of containment.
By the 1970s, the period of this magnificent work, artists began returning to what has been called a “new painterliness.” Extending the gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists against whom they had rebelled with an “anti-painterliness” in the 1960s, titled by its most influential critic Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly abstraction, these artists, among them Frankenthaler, brought back into her surfaces more of this painterly quality, Frankenthaler, re-emphasized the texture of her surfaces as shown in Gateway. Using a variety of staining and over-staining techniques as here within the “proscenium arch” of the eponymous gateway and the surrounding areas, Frankenthaler has achieved a complexity not only of texture, but also of space. The infinite recession as well as the surface flatness suggests multiple planes, yet holds the surface equally, creating nearly unnamable rich coloration that seduces the eye. Frankenthaler’s extraordinary handling of light and shade is also here on view. A suggestion of modeling, of volume creates a frisson of atmospheres.
Ever since her career-defining work, Mountains and Sea, painted in 1952 in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas, Frankenthaler has been at the forefront of American painting. While she engaged with the manner in which Jackson Pollock had stained black enamel paint into raw canvas in his celebrated black and white pictures from 1952, Frankenthaler’s subtle combination of the drawn line and the color field catalyzed a new movement in American art, taken up by the likes of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, albeit to very different effect. Her career has been distinguished by an exceptional number of monographs and has been the subject of numerous museum shows, from a major mid-career survey at the Jewish Museum in 1960 to a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art followed by a European tour of her work, to a survey of her works on paper in 1985 at the Guggenheim museum, as well as the major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, curated by John Elderfield. Through the decades, Frankenthaler’s paintings have been praised for their sensuousness and beauty. Gateway is a summative work filled with great feeling, executed with a masterly technique and characterized by sumptuous textures. It is in its way also a signature work in which various grades of opticality and tactility take effect. “One carries one’s signature, self, vocabulary through life” (H. Frankenthaler quoted in D. Dreishpoon, “It’s a Matter of How You Resolve Your Doubts,” in Giving Up One’s Mark: Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s and 1970s, New York, 2014, p. 22).
Gateway is a work expressive of both its materials and its maker; its sense of flow and structure point to an artist who trusts not only her canvas and pigment, but also her intuition and experience in the present moment. It is also work of art whose extraordinary qualities were recognized by among the foremost collectors of Post-War modernist art of the period. Detroit collectors Irwin and Bethea Green included Frankenthaler in their celebrated collection of works by many of the most revered American modernists of the period, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Hans Hofmann, and Robert Motherwell, among others. Frankenthaler was deeply connected both personally and aesthetically to these artists who explored the arena of disposing pigment in large fields across the canvas. The Greens understood not only the inherent stylistic unity, but also the notion of a total environment where their collection of artworks became integral to their home.
The pictorial organization of Gateway, its banked horizontals as well as and the strong sweep from left to right are reminiscent of some of the finest depictions of Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Paul Cézanne’s vast oeuvre of this motif. Frankenthaler’s engagement with landscape is as rich and deep as Cézanne’s. This is unsurprising in that Frankenthaler would soon embark on a series of homage to great masterworks including works by Manet and Courbet, for example, in which transparency is balanced by thickened textures and drawing, as here in Gateway, is superimposed on a frieze-like horizontal format. In all of these works, nature is close at hand, strikingly rendered by the painterly hand of this extraordinary artist.