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Lot Essay
"In making a painting, you have to allow for the awareness in you that is not fully conscious, allowing for the disorder or chaos that is not yet order, the kind of chaos sometimes expressed in dreams." - Helen Frankenthaler
“Truth comes when one is totally involved in the act of painting... somehow using everything one knows about painting materials, dreams, and feelings. Consciously and unconsciously, the artist allows what must happen to happen. That act connects you to yourself and gives you hope... The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes paintings unique and necessary.” - Helen Frankenthaler
Painted when Helen Frankenthaler was thirty-one years old and had only just emerged on the bourgeoning art scene in New York, Cave Memory is an important and innovative painting that not only advances her pictorial discoveries made in the early 1950s but also reflects a change in her work to a more robust and expressive mode. The painting, made in 1959, bridges various influences from Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and David Smith, while also claiming its own visual identity characterized by her soak-staining technique that revels in the flatness of the canvas.
Rendered with Frankenthaler’s keen sense of balance and marked by vigorous passages of rich and earthy chocolate-brown amongst vibrant swathes of cerulean blue, coalescing with smaller bands of interspersed shades of gray and ochre, Cave Memory bears considerable areas of blank canvas that articulate the compelling imagery within it. At the upper left of the composition, loose charcoal-colored brushstrokes make up the delicate resemblance of two coupled birds. Willowy and splashed strokes of thinned down paint delineate the center of the composition, compelling the eye further back into a recessional space. Here, Frankenthaler creates a unique and masterful composition where passages of white are used to reinforce the abstract forms she creates, as familiar shapes emerge only to disappear back into themselves.
Throughout the 1950s, Frankenthaler not only had vast exposure to the prodigious body of work being produced by her contemporaries, but she also had close relationships with these emerging American talents. Seeing Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings inspired her to also free the canvas from the stretcher, place it directly on the studio floor and pour thinned-down oil paint in the same fashion as Pollock. “Taking paintings off the easel introduced a whole new space and manner of painting,” she said. “Easel painting had been more of a window than a wall. Once freed from the easel, and not confined to an edge, corner, or particular size, your vision can go on forever” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1950-59, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 44). Through controlled pouring and staining of pigment on the unstretched fabric canvas, she creates a subtle and sophisticated composition made up of unfinished canvas alongside both figurative and abstracted forms.
The period in which Cave Memory was created has been described as one of Frankenthaler’s most productive, in terms of its quality. Made during the year following Frankenthaler’s honeymoon with Robert Motherwell in Europe, where they visited the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, the painting is a brilliant iteration of her signature soak-stain technique and embodies her more free and gestural style. The caves were known to have overwhelmed the artist, who admits they looked “like one huge painting on unsized canvas” that reminded her of her own work, referring to the paintings within as “direct, passionate, allover murals”. The influences involving her year-long sojourn as a newlywed in France and Spain can be clearly detected in the new aesthetic style seen in the work produced in the years that followed.
One of the most pioneering and influential painters of her generation, Frankenthaler spoke to her need for painting when she said, “Truth comes when one is totally involved in the act of painting... somehow using everything one knows about painting materials, dreams, and feelings. Consciously and unconsciously, the artist allows what must happen to happen. That act connects you to yourself and gives you hope... The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes paintings unique and necessary” (H. Frankenthaler quoted in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1950-1959, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 46). With a work such as Cave Memory, Frankenthaler demonstrates the mastery of balance between control and emotional gesture associated with the Abstract Expressionists that came before her. Her iconic style, characterized by stunning contrasts of elegant refinement and lyrical freedom, rivals the bravura and gravitas associated with masters such as Pollock and de Kooning.
During the course of her six-decade long career, Frankenthaler arose as one of the central figures within the 20th century art historical canon. Evident in the solid swathes of color that make up Cave Memory’s periphery, Frankenthaler subtly departs from the bold, fierce and slashing brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism, choosing instead to emphasize the flat surface of the canvas and savor the essential nature of oil paint and color. In doing so, she became the pivotal link between Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimalism, establishing new ways to use material and color. One of the foremost colorists of our time, Frankenthaler, through phenomenal innovation, extraordinary beauty and a conception of the canvas as a formalized platform for gesture and paint, produced a body of work whose impact on Contemporary Art has been profound.
“Truth comes when one is totally involved in the act of painting... somehow using everything one knows about painting materials, dreams, and feelings. Consciously and unconsciously, the artist allows what must happen to happen. That act connects you to yourself and gives you hope... The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes paintings unique and necessary.” - Helen Frankenthaler
Painted when Helen Frankenthaler was thirty-one years old and had only just emerged on the bourgeoning art scene in New York, Cave Memory is an important and innovative painting that not only advances her pictorial discoveries made in the early 1950s but also reflects a change in her work to a more robust and expressive mode. The painting, made in 1959, bridges various influences from Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and David Smith, while also claiming its own visual identity characterized by her soak-staining technique that revels in the flatness of the canvas.
Rendered with Frankenthaler’s keen sense of balance and marked by vigorous passages of rich and earthy chocolate-brown amongst vibrant swathes of cerulean blue, coalescing with smaller bands of interspersed shades of gray and ochre, Cave Memory bears considerable areas of blank canvas that articulate the compelling imagery within it. At the upper left of the composition, loose charcoal-colored brushstrokes make up the delicate resemblance of two coupled birds. Willowy and splashed strokes of thinned down paint delineate the center of the composition, compelling the eye further back into a recessional space. Here, Frankenthaler creates a unique and masterful composition where passages of white are used to reinforce the abstract forms she creates, as familiar shapes emerge only to disappear back into themselves.
Throughout the 1950s, Frankenthaler not only had vast exposure to the prodigious body of work being produced by her contemporaries, but she also had close relationships with these emerging American talents. Seeing Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings inspired her to also free the canvas from the stretcher, place it directly on the studio floor and pour thinned-down oil paint in the same fashion as Pollock. “Taking paintings off the easel introduced a whole new space and manner of painting,” she said. “Easel painting had been more of a window than a wall. Once freed from the easel, and not confined to an edge, corner, or particular size, your vision can go on forever” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1950-59, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 44). Through controlled pouring and staining of pigment on the unstretched fabric canvas, she creates a subtle and sophisticated composition made up of unfinished canvas alongside both figurative and abstracted forms.
The period in which Cave Memory was created has been described as one of Frankenthaler’s most productive, in terms of its quality. Made during the year following Frankenthaler’s honeymoon with Robert Motherwell in Europe, where they visited the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, the painting is a brilliant iteration of her signature soak-stain technique and embodies her more free and gestural style. The caves were known to have overwhelmed the artist, who admits they looked “like one huge painting on unsized canvas” that reminded her of her own work, referring to the paintings within as “direct, passionate, allover murals”. The influences involving her year-long sojourn as a newlywed in France and Spain can be clearly detected in the new aesthetic style seen in the work produced in the years that followed.
One of the most pioneering and influential painters of her generation, Frankenthaler spoke to her need for painting when she said, “Truth comes when one is totally involved in the act of painting... somehow using everything one knows about painting materials, dreams, and feelings. Consciously and unconsciously, the artist allows what must happen to happen. That act connects you to yourself and gives you hope... The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes paintings unique and necessary” (H. Frankenthaler quoted in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1950-1959, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 46). With a work such as Cave Memory, Frankenthaler demonstrates the mastery of balance between control and emotional gesture associated with the Abstract Expressionists that came before her. Her iconic style, characterized by stunning contrasts of elegant refinement and lyrical freedom, rivals the bravura and gravitas associated with masters such as Pollock and de Kooning.
During the course of her six-decade long career, Frankenthaler arose as one of the central figures within the 20th century art historical canon. Evident in the solid swathes of color that make up Cave Memory’s periphery, Frankenthaler subtly departs from the bold, fierce and slashing brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism, choosing instead to emphasize the flat surface of the canvas and savor the essential nature of oil paint and color. In doing so, she became the pivotal link between Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and Minimalism, establishing new ways to use material and color. One of the foremost colorists of our time, Frankenthaler, through phenomenal innovation, extraordinary beauty and a conception of the canvas as a formalized platform for gesture and paint, produced a body of work whose impact on Contemporary Art has been profound.