Helen Frankenthaler, Moat, 1963 (detail), oil on canvas, 71 1 2 ! 49 inches (181.6 ! 124.5 cm)

Helen Frankenthaler Composing with Color:

Paintings 1962–1963Organized in collaboration with the newly established Helen

Frankenthaler Foundation, this exhibition focuses on a brief but critical period in Frankenthaler’s career during 1962–63.

Transitioning from the sparer, more graphic works of 1960–61, Frankenthaler made paintings that more readily filled the space

of the canvas, moving toward what critic B. H. Friedman described as the “total color image,” which would become

a hallmark of her later work.

980 Madison Avenue, New York September 11–October 18, 2014

Frankenthaler at work in her studio on East Eighty-Third Street and Third Avenue, New York, 1961, with Blue Form in a Scene (1961) and Swan Lake Series (1961) Helen Frankenthaler, Pink Lady, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 84 1 2 ! 58 inches (214.6 ! 147.3 cm)

LAUREN MAHONY This exhibition focuses on a very brief, but significant period in Frankenthaler’s career. Why focus on the years 1962 and 1963? Where is Frankenthaler in her career at this point?ELIZABETH SMITH Helen Frankenthaler was at a transitional time in her career during the years 1962 and 1963, which is why I titled my essay in the exhibition catalogue “Redefining a Practice” (a phrase that was inspired by a passage in a text on Frankenthaler by art his-torian Anne Wagner). A major survey of her work had taken place just two years before, at the Jewish Museum—which was a venue where many significant young artists’ work was shown, including the first shows of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1960s—and this experience undoubtedly prompted her to question and reconsider aspects of her practice going forward.1 It is important to remember that Frankenthaler was still in her early thirties in 1962 and 1963; while she had completed a substantial body of work in the first decade of her career—includ-ing the landmark painting Mountains and Sea

(1952)—she had not yet begun the work for which she would become best known later in the 1960s, when her reputation as one of the leading artists of her generation would be firmly established.LM The title of the exhibition, Composing with Color, indicates a move away from the more linear compositions that immediately precede this body of work. Can you describe how these paintings differ? What do you think prompted this shift? Were these fleeting explorations or did they carry through her career?ES During these years, Frankenthaler began deepening her exploration of aspects of her work begun in the late 1950s that would antici-pate the developments of the mid- and later sixties. She began to compose with larger areas of color, increasingly considering it inseparable from line and drawing, resulting in paintings that were bolder, brighter, and more defined in their compositions. She started to experi-ment with the use of acrylic paint in 1962, and went back and forth from oil to acrylic until fully adopting the new medium in 1963. She also investigated ways to compose differently

with color, making a group of paintings in 1963 that were “reversed”—with the back of the painted canvases turned to the front and further worked on—resulting in images in which the entire surface was flooded with areas of color, recalling the painting of Rothko. This group of works, colloquially called the “floorboard” pieces because of the visible presence of striations from the wooden floor of her studio on the surfaces, were made mostly in oil paint, but in at least one case incorporated acrylic and oil in a single work (Gulf Stream, 1963). They led directly to a group of subsequent works in 1964 that were bolder, more assertive examples of composi-tions structured around the entire surface of the canvas, including Buddha’s Court and Interior Landscape.

Frankenthaler’s earliest experiments in all-acrylic paintings, such as Pink Lady and Mountain Pool (both 1963), also anticipate the mastery and fluidity in her use of the medium apparent in one of her most majestic works of the early 1960s, The Bay (1963), and in many other important paintings of that decade.

Elizabeth Smith, art historian and executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, in conversation

with Gagosian’s Lauren Mahony

Frankenthaler also distinguished herself as one of the great colorists of late-twentieth- century painting, utilizing color with an unsur-passed boldness, and investigating the full range of its possibilities over a long career. Evident in the paintings of these two years is the diversity of her approach to color. To the question of color and at what point she became conscious of being a “color painter,” she replied: “Only when the world puts those labels on it . . . I mixed funny shades of colors and used them . . . because they made the drawing in my picture move . . . I did not have a vision or a notion about color per se being the thing that would make me or my pictures work or operate.”2 Later, she commented, “For me, as a picture develops, color always comes out of drawing. I never start only with color. I start out as a space maker on a flat thing with four corners . . . Color is also extremely important to my ‘process.’ It’s born out of idea, mood, luck, imagination, risk, into what might even be ugly; then I let it tell me what might/should be used next, until I get the light and order that satisfies to perfection. The result is color and space and, I hope, a beautiful message.”3

LM In your catalogue essay, you discuss these paintings in the context of the early 1960s and the direction of American art in that moment, which you describe as a moment of “extra ordinary transformation.” Can you talk a little about Frankenthaler’s place within, or apart from, movements such as Color Field, Pop, Neo-Dada, and Minimalism?ES These changes and developments within Frankenthaler’s painting took place at a pivotal time in American art history. By 1962 Pop art and a movement then known as Neo-Dada had emerged; Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and many oth-ers were receiving increasing attention for the way their work challenged and overturned the conventions of Abstract Expressionist pain-ting. Artists such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Donald Judd were increasingly moving their work in more reductive direc-tions, and those who were becoming known as the Color Field painters—Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland—were also developing bod-ies of work that eschewed visible evidence of gesture or painterly traces. Frankenthaler, who was known as a second-generation Abstract

Expressionist, had inspired Louis and Noland in the direction their work would take by their exposure to her painting Mountains and Sea. While later she would also be considered, at times, a Color Field painter, and her work shown in exhibitions that included theirs, such as Post Painterly Abstraction (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964), she never fit easily into that movement.

Throughout her career, Frankenthaler maintained an independent vision and one that was often distinct from that of her contempo-raries. Unlike them, for instance, she chose not to make work in series (with few exceptions), but considered each painting an individual exploration, in which she freely returned to motifs and ideas from earlier pictures and embraced aspects of chance and “accident” that suited the needs of the composition. The presence of allusive qualities and visual ref-erences to imagery from the known world, a hallmark of her work throughout her career, further distinguished her from many of her contemporaries who purged such references from their art. Also unusual was her evident interest in art history and in the work of the old masters as well as nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century precedents.LM One painting in the exhibition, Hommage à M.L. (1962), refers to an earlier twentieth-century painter, Marie Laurencin. How does it relate to the earlier painter’s work? Was it a common practice of Frankenthaler’s to refer-ence historical figures?ES Marie Laurencin was one of the few well-known female art-historical figures at the time Frankenthaler made this work. Often during her career she would reference the work of ear-lier artists and paintings that inspired or had an impact on her in some way. For instance, her 1981 painting For E.M. is based on a small still life painting by Édouard Manet in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Henri Matisse was a source of inspiration for several paintings, as were artists ranging from Titian to Carel Fabritius to Francisco Goya, all of whom Frankenthaler acknowledged directly in the titles to the works that she made using the tonalities, compositions, and figurative references in their paintings as a point of departure for her own abstractions.LM There have been several exhibitions of

Frankenthaler’s work in the last year and a half, beginning with Gagosian Gallery’s Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959 (2013), which introduced this influential twentieth-century artist to a new generation of art lovers. What do you hope new audiences will take away from this group of paintings?ES From this exhibition I hope that viewers will gain a new understanding of a little-known chapter in Frankenthaler’s work—one that was critically important in her passage from the strongly gestural and painterly works of the 1950s to the greater clarity and boldness of her vocabulary in the 1960s.

Aspects of the way Frankenthaler experi-mented and deftly yet searchingly honed her approach to abstract painting are made newly apparent by the paintings included in this exhibition. Most striking, to my mind, is the resonance of her work with that of much con-temporary painting practice today. In terms of its allusiveness, its taut yet syncopated balance of seeming spontaneity and rigorous control, its embrace of color, and its refusal to be categorized—Frankenthaler’s paint-ing suggests affinities with that of artists of a younger generation. In this respect the work of artists as diverse as Cecily Brown, Albert Oehlen, Charline von Heyl, Laura Owens, and Mary Weatherford comes to mind. As poet Frank O’Hara, who curated her 1960 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, commented, Frankenthaler’s work is “inclusive and gener-ous, free-ranging, and enthusiastic.”4 These qualities persisted throughout her work over the decades. She once commented, “It isn’t that I want to experiment with style. I often want to experiment with the different ways I know myself.”5

1. The Jewish Museum also presented the 1957 show Artists of the New York School: Second Generation, in which Frankenthaler’s work was included.

2. “Oral history interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” conducted by Barbara Rose, August 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

3. Helen Frankenthaler quoted in Karen Wilkin, Frankenthaler: Works on Paper 1949–1984 (New York: George Braziller, 1984), p. 69.

4. Frank O’Hara, “Helen Frankenthaler,” in Helen Frankenthaler Paintings (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1960), p. 5.

5. Frankenthaler, in Rose, “Oral history interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” 1968.

Color is . . . born out of idea, mood, luck, imagination, risk, into what might even be ugly; then I let it tell me what might/should be used next, until I get the light and order

that satisfies to perfection. Helen Frankenthaler, 1983–84

Helen Frankenthaler, Gulf Stream, 1963, oil and acrylic on canvas, 86 ! 65 inches (218.4 ! 165.1 cm)40