TOTAL ABSTRACTION

 

 

Mountains and Sea, 1952

 Robinson's Wrap, 1974

 

This week we lost a true original in the art world.  Helen Frankenthaler was an abstract expressionist painter largely influenced by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollack and Clement Greenberg.  Together with the leading expressionist painters of the time, she developed a method of abstract painting known as Color Field.  Her large-scale paintings were created by pouring the paint directly onto the canvas, creating a "soak stain" effect.  Her work is a beautiful reminder that color and imagination can definitely go a long way.

Total abstraction was something intellectual to me.  I didn't feel it; I could talk about Mondrian but it didn't occur to me to do it.  I saw a Dubuffet show at Pierre Matisse in the late forties and came back with a new vocabulary.  Also when Baziotes won the Carnegie there was a reproduction in the Times.  I remember bringing it to class.  It was a source of bewilderment, delineated configurations that seemed to come out of Cubism.  It was something new.  Those were the tastes of a whole dimension that was to come, much more abstract and allover...

~ Helen Frankenthaler, October 1965