ART CITIES:Venice-Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field Painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, she expanded the possibilities of abstract painting, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in unique ways. She produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to grow.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museo di Palazzo Grimani Archive
The exhibition with works by Helen Frankenthaler entitled “PITTURA / PANORAMA. Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1992” that is on show at Palazzo Grimani is the first presentation of her work in Venice since its appearance in 1966 at the American Pavilion of the 33rd Venice Biennale and features 14 paintings drawn from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Collection, covering a 40-year span of the artist’s career. The works of the exhibition range from ”Open Wall” (1953), a painting that anticipated the work of the Color Field school of the 1960s, to Frankenthaler’s richly atmospheric canvases of the early 1990s. The works are installed in a broadly but not strictly chronological sequence, revealing connections between works of different periods, and a development of both continuity and continuing change. They comprise four major groupings. Frankenthaler’s first experience of large, horizontal contemporary paintings was in 1950 when, as a 21-year-old artist not long out of college, she saw abstract compositions by Jackson Pollock made with looping skeins of poured paint. In the earliest canvas in the exhibition, “Window Shade No. 2” (1952), she tried something similar on a smaller scale; then applied the lesson to works alluding to landscape, as with “10/29/52”. And, when Frankenthaler made a big horizontal picture, such as “Open Wall”, it was with broad areas as well as lines of paint: Its title shows that she was conscious of the early 1950s debate among New York painters and critics, as to whether a painting should be like a window or a wall. She wanted both, a wall that was open. For Frankenthaler, a painting was an expanse of flat surface that created the illusion of spatial depth. In the 1960s, the former tended to dominate in her work. In “Italian Beach” (1960), painted at Alassio, abbreviations for a hilltop, a band of foliage, and an expanse of sand bridge the space from a pool of sea-blue to the right edge of the canvas. “Pink Bird Figure” (1961) expands the flat image of a bird above a flight path drawn horizontally across the painting. But with “Riverhead” (1963), she re-engaged the painterliness of her 1950s canvases in a more sumptuous manner. The graphic treatment of “New Paths” (1973) may suggest that the artist has, in fact, revived the old path of her 1960s canvases. But it is a new one, combining flat, schematic marking with an inventive manner of opening pictorial space: She graded the narrow ribbons that span the light horizontal channel so that they appear to recede as they diminish in size. By the early 1980s, though, Frankenthaler had first amplified the painterly approach of “Riverhead”, like in “For E.M.” (1981), and then again readjusted her pictorial vocabulary: She laid down monochromatic fields of atmospheric color and superimposed a scatter of dabs, dots, and dashes of more tangible pigment, as with “Brother Angel” (1983), or floating islands of color and calligraphic lines, with “Madrid” (1984). Frankenthaler’s work of the 1990s, being less well-known, is represented here by four major canvases from early in that decade. In these, she looks back again to the painterliness of “Riverhead” 30 years earlier, filling out these new canvases in an even more dramatic manner. As a younger artist she had said, “My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates, and not nature per se”. The titles of her canvases of the 1990s evoke extreme climatic conditions: “Maelstrom” (1992) or places in which they occur as “Snow Basin” (1990) or their beginning to occur “Overture” (1992), or their measurement like “Barometer” (1992). And Frankenthaler’s spreading and layering of stained pigment creates a richly atmospheric evocation of water and sky that ultimately looks back to Venetian painting of the 16th Century, doing so in a highly personal manner that also points ahead to the work of the many artists who take inspiration from her today.
Info: Curator: John Elderfield, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Castello, Venice, Duration: 7/5-17/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.palazzogrimani.org
