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Lot Essay
Head of the Meadow, with its dramatic and powerful passages of dramatic color, reflects Frankenthaler's desire to pursue her own path within the male dominated realm of Abstract Expressionism. The artist's signature use of staining--pouring the pigment directly onto raw canvas laid out on the floor--was inherited from Jackson Pollock, yet Frankenthaler's gestures were more fluid and harmonious than many of her male counterparts lending her work a more poetic and lyrical quality. Comprised of vivid passages of yellow, blue, green and orange, Frankenthaler allows these colors to engage in a dialogue with each other and the air around them, responding to the movement of the eye as it glides across the surface of the painting.
During the 1960s, Frankenthaler began to incorporate a more literal sense of space into the assembled forms and condensed signs that filled her canvases. As a result, her work became as much a focus on the tension between the foreground and background, as it was about the shapes and colors that her pouring technique produced. The way she maneuvered the interlocking and overlaid planes of complementary colors as she examines ideas of depth and flatness recalls the Cubist period of Picasso and the unique style of Cézanne--two artists who were a great influence on her work. In 1967, the year she painted Head of the Meadow, Frankenthaler said, "Color can be beautiful in terms of how it moves; yet it remains in place. If color doesn't move in space, it is only decorative." (H. Frankenthaler, quoted by J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p.184). In Head of the Meadow, this sense of drama comes into play as the blue is deployed and seems to invade the space occupied by the yellow, thus introducing a third color-a light green halo-as the two pigments come into contact with each other and tussle for supremacy.
Painted during the summer of 1967, this work was produced during a remarkable period of change for Frankenthaler as her work began to receive wide critical acclaim. By this period, her style had become more assertive and her palette more daring, leading to shapes that boader with harder and thicker edges as if Frankenthaler was exploding and liberating her very own style. In 1972, the art critic Barbara Rose pronounced her great admiration for the artist's particular gift of portraying, "freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but intimately tied to nature and human emotions." (B. Rose, quoted by G. Glueck, New York Times, December 27, 2011). Beautiful and powerful, with hues and shapes perfectly balanced yet allowing a captivating movement inside and out the canvas, Head of the Meadow captures this impulsiveness and invites the viewer to loose themselves in the three fantastical and imaginative elements, each depicting an abstract and yet at the same time being so true to nature.
During the 1960s, Frankenthaler began to incorporate a more literal sense of space into the assembled forms and condensed signs that filled her canvases. As a result, her work became as much a focus on the tension between the foreground and background, as it was about the shapes and colors that her pouring technique produced. The way she maneuvered the interlocking and overlaid planes of complementary colors as she examines ideas of depth and flatness recalls the Cubist period of Picasso and the unique style of Cézanne--two artists who were a great influence on her work. In 1967, the year she painted Head of the Meadow, Frankenthaler said, "Color can be beautiful in terms of how it moves; yet it remains in place. If color doesn't move in space, it is only decorative." (H. Frankenthaler, quoted by J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p.184). In Head of the Meadow, this sense of drama comes into play as the blue is deployed and seems to invade the space occupied by the yellow, thus introducing a third color-a light green halo-as the two pigments come into contact with each other and tussle for supremacy.
Painted during the summer of 1967, this work was produced during a remarkable period of change for Frankenthaler as her work began to receive wide critical acclaim. By this period, her style had become more assertive and her palette more daring, leading to shapes that boader with harder and thicker edges as if Frankenthaler was exploding and liberating her very own style. In 1972, the art critic Barbara Rose pronounced her great admiration for the artist's particular gift of portraying, "freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but intimately tied to nature and human emotions." (B. Rose, quoted by G. Glueck, New York Times, December 27, 2011). Beautiful and powerful, with hues and shapes perfectly balanced yet allowing a captivating movement inside and out the canvas, Head of the Meadow captures this impulsiveness and invites the viewer to loose themselves in the three fantastical and imaginative elements, each depicting an abstract and yet at the same time being so true to nature.