For sixty-plus years, Helen Frankenthaler made paintings, prints, woodcuts and sculptures. “My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates… not nature per se,” she said, “but a feeling…” Her works are feeling, just as nature is, at once deep, mystical, impenetrable, and ineffable. How to pin down the feeling of a sunrise or one of Frankenthaler’s large paintings—they invoke feelings that are deep in, yet essential. Frankenthaler had the unique ability to reach into herself and consistently pull out onto the surface, into the light, representations of essence.
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Looking at her paintings based on compositions by artists she admired, like Degas, Matisse, Rembrandt, Manet and others, they clearly show her bonding with the essence of these masters’ works rather than copying them. Her painting, The Widow of Fantin Latour (1988), alongside Degas’ Victoria Dubourg (1868-69), is as if she is painting Victoria’s spirit, filmy and viscous, emanating from her body. Her Madame Matisse (1983) references Matisse’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1913). His is a solid, physical portrait, whereas Frankenthaler seems to capture his wife’s essence using his same colors yet hers are like ectoplasm, floating joy.
This is energy contained in color and form and yet set free, different from Pollack or Gorky whom she admired. Their pieces can feel tormented, fractured, searching and sometimes forced. Her work, on the other hand, feels allowed—the inside free to form upward onto her surfaces, out of her. She was not afraid to allow beauty, tenderness, flow, grace and explosion to be expressed. This is not to compare her to other artists, for all great art is without comparison, but to articulate the many sensations that arise when standing in front of her work. She absorbs you. Her paintings take you into her world, to a place where there is no representation. Where intellect, emotion, thoughts and the spiritual mystical are all absorbed into sensation.
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Frankenthaler’s pictures are mysteries. Her work asks, not demands. It invites, not attacks. In this way, it feels female, unlike artworks created by Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, who felt, understandably, a need to compete with men and so painted edgy and bold. Frankenthaler’s art feels edgeless, as if she could engulf you in her liquid forms and color. Here is an artist without containment—a rare feat accomplished by a woman creating in a male art world dominated by the likes of Pollack and........