Helen Frankenthaler @ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London - Radical Beauty

Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Through 18 April 2022

Dulwich Picture Gallery presents the first major UK exhibition of woodcuts by the leading Abstract Expressionist, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). Shining a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts it showcases works never shown before in the UK, to reveal Helen Frankenthaler as a creative force and a trailblazer of printmaking, who endlessly pushed the possibilities of the medium.

Ranging from Helen Frankenthaler’s first ever woodcut in 1973, to her last work published in 2009, this major print retrospective brings together 30 works on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, including Madame Butterfly (2000) and East and Beyond (1973) to reveal the enormous diversity in scale and technique in her oeuvre. Challenging traditional notions of woodcut printmaking, the exhibition reveals the charge and energy behind Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘no rules’ approach, arranged thematically to spotlight the elements crucial to her unique style of mark-marking, from experimentation to inspiration and collaboration.

At the age of only 23 Helen Frankenthaler created her influential oil painting Mountains and Sea (1952), the first work produced using her signature soak stain technique - pouring thinned paint directly onto canvas from above to create broad expanses of translucent color. It was a breakthrough that would propel Frankenthaler into the spotlight of the New York art scene at a time where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning dominated. This technique went on to influence the artists of the Color Field school of painting, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and had a profound impact on her printmaking career.

Opening ten years after her death, ‘Radical Beauty’ examines Helen Frankenthaler’s revolutionary approach to the woodcut, positioning her as one of the medium’s great innovators. In the same way as she did with her earlier paintings, Helen Frankenthaler defied the limitations of what is often considered the most rudimentary of printmaking techniques; she found new dimensions to the medium, experimenting with different orientations and colourways, and a variety of new tools and methods. What resulted is an incomparable body of work, where prints appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms.

Highlights include Helen Frankenthaler’s first woodcut East and Beyond (1973) created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space. The work holds a sense of tangible colour and form, but at the same time has a fluidity that sets it apart from other artists at the time such as Jasper Johns. Other standout works include Cameo (1980) and Freefall (1993), which further demonstrate how Helen Frankenthaler accepted the challenge of woodcut printmaking and found ways to make it yield to her approach. In Cameo, Helen Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to colour and used her distinctive “guzzying” technique – where she worked her surfaces with sandpaper and in some instances, dentist drills, to achieve different affects.

A key focus of the exhibition is Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly (2000). Sharing its title with the 1904 opera by Giacomo Puccini, the triptych’s light pastel colours and stained marks show Frankenthaler at her most expressive and lyrical. Created in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata from 46 woodblocks and 102 colours, the work measures over two metres in length and occupies an entire room in the exhibition, along with a work proof and study to explore the complexity of its evocative title. In this print, and in others in the exhibition we can also understand Helen Frankenthaler’s working process and how each collaboration propelled her forward creatively. The exhibition includes all six woodcuts of the series Tales of Genji (1998), a highly ambitious body of work for which Helen Frankenthaler employed her soak-stain technique– this time painting with water-based colours onto sheets of plywood. Working with Tyler and his studio of printmakers once again, they embarked on a process of constant experimentation and a journey of trial and error to achieve Helen Frankenthaler’s vision.

Jane Findlay, Exhibition Curator and Head of Programme & Engagement at Dulwich Picture Gallery, said:

“This is a truly special opportunity for visitors to get up close to Frankenthaler’s phenomenal works – all of which have never been shown before in this country – in the intimate spaces of Dulwich Picture Gallery. There is something magical about how she breathes life into such a rigid medium, retaining the energy and dynamism - that born at once feeling - that you see in her painting. And with her proofs and process explored alongside we’ll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling works – revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.”

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

Gallery Road, London SE21 7AD

www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

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Painters of the East End @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Jane Wilson

Painters of the East End
Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson
Kasmin Gallery, New York
July 11 - August 16, 2019

JANE FREILICHER

Landscape in Water Mill, 1962

Oil on linen, 18 x 20 inches, 45.7 x 50.8 cm. 

Courtesy of the Estate of Jane Freilicher. 

Kasmin announces Painters of the East End, on view at 297 Tenth Avenue. The exhibition explores the commonalities and distinctions of the work produced amongst the coterie culture of Long Island’s South Fork during the mid-twentieth century, including Mary Abbott, Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, and Jane Wilson.

Artists have historically converged on Long Island seeking inspiration from the landscape and an escape from their confined urban studios, while still retaining access to the energy of New York City. With the mass influx of the European avant-garde following the onset of World War II and the subsequent establishment of the New York School, a thriving and collaborative artist-based community was born in the East End.

The Hamptons of the New York School was untamed, inexpensive, and a bastion of bohemian living. The opportunities provided by the area’s open spaces were developmental for the painters who set up there not only because of their practical advantages—larger studios, relative quiet—but for novel subject-matter that allowed for contemplations of the horizon, rural landscapes, and bodies of water, nodding to the lineage of the Romantic sublime.

Perhaps most crucial for these artists was their shared inspirations which led to a new model of community, differing in both structure and character from the frenetic energy of lower Manhattan. Such a social scene was integral to both the personal and artistic lives of the artists represented in the exhibition. Helen A. Harrison, Director at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, says of the period: “The painters who gravitated to Long Island's South Fork in the mid-twentieth century were a far more varied group than the earlier art colonists, who came primarily for the picturesque scenery. They ran the gamut from landscape painters to Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists, and Pop artists, so it's clear that many were motivated by factors other than subject matter. Perhaps even more important than the beautiful surroundings and the ease of access from New York City was the magnetism of association, as artists attracted one another to form a vibrant creative community that continues to thrive today.”

The exhibition includes: Mary Abbott (b. 1921), Nell Blaine (1922 – 1996), Perle Fine (1905 – 1988), Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), Jane Freilicher (1924 – 2014), Elaine de Kooning (1918 – 1989), Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984), Joan Mitchell (1925 – 1992), Charlotte Park (1918 – 2010), Betty Parsons (1900 –1982), and Jane Wilson (1924 – 2015).

KASMIN GALLERY
297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.kasmingallery.com

Helen Frankenthaler | Aimée Parrot, Pippy Houldworth Gallery, London - Soaked, Not Resting

Helen Frankenthaler | Aimée Parrot

Soaked, Not Resting

Pippy Houldworth Gallery, London

23 January – 21 February 2015

Before [Fall of 1952], I had always painted on sized and primed canvas – but my paint was becoming thinner and more fluid and cried out to be soaked, not resting.

– Helen Frankenthaler

Soaked, Not Resting examines the different ways in which celebrated Color Field painter Helen Frankenthaler and emerging artist Aimée Parrott negotiate the picture plane, looking in particular at both artists’ deployment of staining.

An exponent of Color Field painting, Helen Frankenthaler is renowned for pouring thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas to create stained pools of vibrant colour. Developing Pollock’s pouring technique, Helen Frankenthaler initiated a new way of working with paint. Using squeegees, sponges and household brushes to manoeuvre the paint horizontally across the canvas, the resultant ‘soak-stain’ effect serves to emphasise the physicality of the surface. As Professor Mona Hadler explains: ‘the stained image appears to be neither in front of nor illusionistically behind the picture plane. It is literally one with the canvas.’

Helen Frankenthaler’s early works are characterised by airy, luminous compositions which give over to pure colour, with figure and ground merging into one. By the 1980s, her work gradually became calmer; Helen Frankenthaler’s mark making occurred in more muted tones, and though still concerned with the relationship between shape and space, her gestures were more considered. Quattrocento (1984) exemplifies this shift. Deep mauves blend into turquoise greens, bleeding across the canvas from left to right. Demarcated by black striations, this expanse of colour is offset by a border of lush pink.

Combining methods of painting and printmaking, Aimée Parrott uses staining to a similar end. Her large watercolour paintings are made using an open screenprinting technique where pigment is transferred directly onto the canvas through a polyester mesh. Like Helen Frankenthaler, gestural washes are embedded into the fabric weave of her paintings. However, whilst Frankenthaler emphasises the flatness of the canvas, Aimée Parrott instead plays with pictorial depth by building up veil-like layers of colour that coalesce into amorphous forms.

Describing how these pieces are made, Aimée Parrott explains: ‘the transfer of the pigment from screen to canvas creates a disjunction, a stutter between the original gesture and the surface on which it sits. Specifically, I want to create different spaces within the work; using raw or stained canvas holds the viewer on the surface of the piece, forcing them to consider the texture, the weave, whilst gestural marks push beyond the physical object into an illusory or imaginary space.’ This sense of depth is further intensified by the use of bleach, which breaks the homogeneity of the canvas in order to create an uneven ground for the print to sit on.

Where the pigment is pushed through the screen, ghostly traces of the original squeegee marks remain floating on, and behind, the surface, serving to disrupt the original application of watercolour. Whilst strangely familiar, these amoeba-like shapes evade recognition by constantly shifting in and out of focus. In effect, Aimée Parrott’s mark making triggers deeper, sensory memories. Playing with our perception, her approach calls to mind the way in which we process external stimuli, both visual and physical, in order to understand the world around us. Treating the canvas surface like a layer of skin, the artist simulates how the world imprints itself on our bodies. Significantly, Helen Frankenthaler also cited the influence of such external stimuli within her work, often translating the natural landscape into abstract compositions. In 1957, she commented, ‘if I am forced to associate, I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes, worlds, and distances held on a flat surface.’

Continuing Aimée Parrott’s exploration of different surfaces, the exhibition also features her distinctive ‘overlap’ works. Sitting somewhere between painting and sculpture, these pieces feature an extra layer of fabric hanging from the top of the canvas which mimic the composition beneath. This reproduction is a flatter, more homogenised image that partially obscures the underlying canvas, sanitised and removed from the surface of its original counterpart.

Whilst Helen Frankenthaler’s works on canvas are characteristically flat, her works on paper play with layering in a similar way to Aimée Parrott’s overlap paintings. Built with multiple coats of oil and overlaid marks, painting on paper enabled Helen Frankenthaler to experiment with the interplay between surface and deep space. For instance, in Blue on One Side (1962), patches of opaque blue assert the flatness of the picture plane. However, where these blocks of paint bleed into the fibres of the paper, the colour begins to withdraw backwards.

HELEN FRANKENTHALER was born in New York City, 1928, and died in Darien, CT, 2011. Following her first solo show in 1951 at age 22, Helen Frankenthaler’s work has been exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Mexico and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, amongst numerous others. Her estate is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Helen Frankenthaler’s work is in the collections of the V&A, London; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Cincinnati Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Tate, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst many other public and private collections worldwide. Her work is currently the subject of a major solo exhibition at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Born in England, 1987, AIMÉE PARROTT graduated from the University College Falmouth in 2009 with a BA in Fine Art and in 2014 received a Post Graduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London. Her work has been shown at Breese Little, London; Ink-d Gallery, Brighton; Simmons and Simmons, London; Tintype Gallery, London; Matt Roberts Gallery, London; Minerva Theatre, Chichester and A.P.T. Gallery, London. Aimée Parrott has completed residencies with the Artists League of New York and Angelika Studios, and is the recipient of the Archie Sherman Scholarship and the Ford Award.

PIPPY HOULDWORTH GALLERY

6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT

www.houldsworth.co.uk

Color Field Works from the 1960s and 1970s @ Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, curated by Hayden Dunbar

Openness and Clarity: Color Field Works from the 1960s and 1970s
Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles
June 7 — August 2, 2014

Honor Fraser Gallery presents Openness and Clarity: Color Field Works from the 1960s and 1970s, curated by HAYDEN DUNBAR. The show includes works by Josef Albers, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella.

Assembling works rarely exhibited in Los Angeles, Openness and Clarity seeks to examine the pivotal role that Color Field painters and their direct predecessors played in the evolution of abstract art, while also proving the work's persisting ability to captivate the contemporary eye. The title of the exhibition references CLEMENT GREENBERG's catalog essay for his seminal 1964 exhibition, Post Painterly Abstraction, which championed a new group of artists that rejected painterliness in favor of an "openness and clarity" in color and contour. Organized for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition introduced thirty-one artists whose restrained arrangements of saturated color in vaporous soft-edged shapes and geometrical hard-edged forms reacted to the dense, gestural brushwork and raw emotion of the Abstract Expressionists. Diminishing distinctions between object and ground, these paintings formed a cool-headed and fresh visual language that de-emphasized line to privilege the perceptual effects of color: "What sets the best Color Field paintings apart is the extraordinary economy of means with which they manage not only to engage our feelings but also to ravish the eye." (Karen Wilkin, Color As Field: American Painting, 1950 – 1975, p. 17.)

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of LACMA's historic exhibition, Openness and Clarity presents a selection of exceptional works by five artists who were integral to Clement Greenberg's thesis and were instrumental in advancing abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s: Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella. Though not included in Post Painterly Abstraction, the works of JOSEF ALBERTS establish a direct link between these artists' early and ongoing emphasis on color and form. As a teacher at Black Mountain College and Yale University, his work and ideas set a foundation for younger artists to expand upon and rebel against. His inclusion in this exhibition also underscores the social framework within which all of these artists were working and which provided a sphere of mutual influence. Josef Albers's Homage to the Square: Warm-Near (1966) is an example of his commitment to pure geometry and the interaction of color.

Using an all-over staining technique to achieve lyrical, floating shapes and radiant hues, HELEN FRANKENTHALER poured and applied washes of thinned paint with rags in works like Bach's Sacred Theater (1973). After Clement Greenberg showed him Helen Frankenthaler's work, MORRIS LOUIS followed her lead and embarked on intense experimentation with materials and color that led to the various acclaimed series he completed before his untimely death at age forty-nine. Kaf (1959-1960) is from his Floral series, an excellent and rarely seen example of Morris Louis's breakthrough work. Clement Greenberg also introduced KENNETH NOLAND to Hellen Frankenthaler's innovations, and like Louis (Noland's close friend) he embraced the potential of staining unprimed canvas with thinned pigments. A student of Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland invigorated his devotion to geometry with unusually shaped and stained canvases, as can be seen in works like Bolton Landing: Singing the Blues (1962) and Warm Weekend (1967). A close friend of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, JULES OLISKI was a bold colorist whose biomorphic forms alternately floated in monochromatic fields (as in Mushroom Joy [1959]) and pushed at the edges of the canvas (as in Z [1964]).

Known as an Abstract Expressionist and part of The New York School, ROBERT MOTHERWELL took a minimal approach to the use of color in the late 1960s, creating a series of expansive, nearly monochromatic canvases. Open No. 20: In Orange with Charcoal Line (1968) demonstrates Robert Motherwell's interest in color and composition as subjects. Like Robert Motherwell and Kenneth Noland, FRANK STELLA turned to painting as the subject matter for painting, pushing beyond the conventional rectilinear limits of the canvas and challenging notions of painting and objecthood. Sunapee IV (1966) from Franck Stella's Irregular Polygon series demonstrates his ability to marry color and form. On loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Ctesiphon I (1968) is part of Franck Stella's Protractor Variation series and exemplifies the rigor and energy for which he became so well known. These radical geometries are echoed in ANTHONY CARO's Dumbfound (1976). On a 1960 visit from England to the United States, Anthony Caro met Clement Greenberg, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and the sculptor David Smith, all of whom made a lasting impression on him. Returning to England, Anthony Caro developed a monochromatic collage style that favored open forms and horizontality, which can be seen in Dumbfound (1976).

Openness and Clarity pays tribute to the legacy of Color Field artists who paved the way for Minimalism, Conceptual, and Pop art, creating an enduring shift in the course of art history that can still be seen today.

HONOR FRASER GALLERY
2622 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034
honorfraser.com

Helen Frankenthaler, Knoedler & Company, NYC

Frankenthaler: New Paintings

Knoedler & Company, New York

May 1 - July 18, 2003

Knoedler & Company presents Frankenthaler: New Paintings. For most of the past decade, Helen Frankenthaler has focused on paintings on paper, returning to painting on canvas only this past year. This show marks the first exhibition of these new works and the first time that both paintings on canvas and those on paper of comparable large scale have been shown together.

In her recent paintings on paper Helen Frankenthaler continues to explore and expand upon the wide-ranging dimensions of her distinctive abstract vocabulary. The new paintings on canvas relate more closely to the abstract “landscape” traits which have been a central aspect of her art since the landmark painting Mountains and Sea of 1952 (collection of the artist, on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC).

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated clothbound book.

KNOEDLER & COMPANY

19 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021

www.knoedlergallery.com