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Lot Essay
Painted in 1979, Helen Frankenthaler’s Basin is an exceptional, large-scale example of her mid-career work, exemplifying what John Elderfield has called “the painterly paintings of the late 1970s” (J. Elderfield, in “Chapter Six: Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” Frankenthaler, New York, 2024, p. 299). Suffused with aqueous blue tones and peppered with touches of bright iridescent yellow, burgundy and pink that shimmer in certain lights, Basin demonstrates the finesse with which the artist manipulated color in her 1970s paintings. No longer content with simple colors silhouetted against an empty ground, Frankenthaler now covered more of the canvas surface and experimented with a wider variety of richly nuanced hues. Closer to the end of the decade, she also incorporated specks and splatters of seemingly undiluted paint, and used squeegees and a sponge to drag the paint across the surface. “The only rule is that there are no rules,” she declared. “Anything is possible” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in K. Wilkin, Frankenthaler: Works on Paper 1949-1984, exh. cat., New York, 1984, p. 101).
Whereas her earlier paintings of the 1950s and ‘60s retained much of the bare canvas, which acted as a kind of foil to her poured color shapes, now in the late 1970s, there is less empty canvas and a more sophisticated relationship with color. As in Basin, Frankenthaler covered more of the painting's surface, leaving fewer “air spaces,” as she called them. In the present work, the suffused passages of pale blue create a palpable sense of atmospheric depth, evoking the fathomless blue ocean and rain-sodden clouds. Frankenthaler achieved this through thin washes of color that were applied slowly over time, with the artist even turning the painting upside down at one point. Having thinned down the paint with turpentine, she allowed it to pool and drip, exploiting its transparent qualities which lets in more light and makes for a more radiant experience. A wide variety of techniques in the upper register demonstrates her continued inventiveness in this decade: whether dragged, splattered, dripped or pooled, she exploited the possibility of each bright color as they play off each other, resulting in firecracker-like sparkles and bursts of bright light.
Bodies of water and the color blue were frequent leitmotifs in Frankenthaler’s work, from her earliest paintings of the 1960s that were painted in her summer home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to the paintings of the 1970s that were influenced by her time in Shippan Point, Connecticut. Frankenthaler worked in Provincetown regularly throughout the summers of 1960 to 1969. Her references to water include The Bay (1963; Detroit Institute of Art), Riverhead (1963; Kunstmuseum Basel), and Flood (1967; Whitney Museum of American Art). In the summer of 1974, Frankenthaler leased a waterfront home on Ocean West Drive in Shippan Point; overlooking the Long Island Sound, this location allowed her to witness the changing atmospheric effects of the weather as it rolled in over the ocean. Frankenthaler spent two summers on Ocean West Drive, and later purchased a home on nearby Saddle Rock Road in 1978.
By the time she painted Basin in 1979, Frankenthaler was at the top of her game. Already an established, well-respected artist, Frankenthaler’s pioneering soak-stain technique had put her on the map as one of the leading artists of her generation. In 1952, she painted Mountains and Sea (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), made by pouring thinned-down oil paint directly onto the canvas surface. She placed the unstretched fabric directly onto the floor, having been inspired by a visit to Jackson Pollock’s studio just a year earlier. These paintings were unusual and new, evocative of an avant-garde style of painting known as “Color Field” that prioritized the liquescent properties of the material itself, rather than illusionistic portrayal. Frankenthaler’s paintings nevertheless tended to evoke a sense of landscape. She often gravitated toward a horizontal format that gave the painting a “cinematic” quality, and she allowed the bare canvas to infuse her work with an airy feeling of light and atmosphere.
In October 1976, Frankenthaler attended Willem de Kooning’s exhibition at Xavier Fourcade Gallery in New York, where he exhibited Whose Name Was Writ in Water (1975, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) for the first time. De Kooning sometimes mixed his oil paint with safflower oil, whipping them into an almost fluffy consistency, and these big, fluid abstractions may have encouraged Frankenthaler to embrace different textures and paint applications in addition to her iconic soak-stain technique.
Toward the end of 1977, Frankenthaler witnessed another exhibit, this time featuring Cezanne’s late paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. Of particular interest to the artist were Cezanne’s paintings of geological stratifications. In his paintings of rocks and trees, and in depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne seemed to layer up the colors in horizontal stacks (not unlike the horizontal banding in the upper register of Basin). The venerable art historian John Elderfield has recently summarized these influences in his lengthy and informative monograph on the artist.
Also of note is the influence of Frankenthaler’s one-time teacher, Hans Hofmann, and his push/pull technique. As in Basin, Frankenthaler experimented with a kind of pulled slab technique — almost like a brushstroke that has been stretched and drawn out until the brush runs dry – which is visible in the upper register. She also dramatically increased the scale of her paintings, many of which maintain a large horizontal format (which inevitably refer back to the great landscape traditions of the 19th Century). All of these influences seemed to summarize what John Elderfield observed, that in the late 1970s, Frankenthaler “began a productive period of very generous paintings” (J. Elderfield, Ibid., p. 302).
Whereas her earlier paintings of the 1950s and ‘60s retained much of the bare canvas, which acted as a kind of foil to her poured color shapes, now in the late 1970s, there is less empty canvas and a more sophisticated relationship with color. As in Basin, Frankenthaler covered more of the painting's surface, leaving fewer “air spaces,” as she called them. In the present work, the suffused passages of pale blue create a palpable sense of atmospheric depth, evoking the fathomless blue ocean and rain-sodden clouds. Frankenthaler achieved this through thin washes of color that were applied slowly over time, with the artist even turning the painting upside down at one point. Having thinned down the paint with turpentine, she allowed it to pool and drip, exploiting its transparent qualities which lets in more light and makes for a more radiant experience. A wide variety of techniques in the upper register demonstrates her continued inventiveness in this decade: whether dragged, splattered, dripped or pooled, she exploited the possibility of each bright color as they play off each other, resulting in firecracker-like sparkles and bursts of bright light.
Bodies of water and the color blue were frequent leitmotifs in Frankenthaler’s work, from her earliest paintings of the 1960s that were painted in her summer home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to the paintings of the 1970s that were influenced by her time in Shippan Point, Connecticut. Frankenthaler worked in Provincetown regularly throughout the summers of 1960 to 1969. Her references to water include The Bay (1963; Detroit Institute of Art), Riverhead (1963; Kunstmuseum Basel), and Flood (1967; Whitney Museum of American Art). In the summer of 1974, Frankenthaler leased a waterfront home on Ocean West Drive in Shippan Point; overlooking the Long Island Sound, this location allowed her to witness the changing atmospheric effects of the weather as it rolled in over the ocean. Frankenthaler spent two summers on Ocean West Drive, and later purchased a home on nearby Saddle Rock Road in 1978.
By the time she painted Basin in 1979, Frankenthaler was at the top of her game. Already an established, well-respected artist, Frankenthaler’s pioneering soak-stain technique had put her on the map as one of the leading artists of her generation. In 1952, she painted Mountains and Sea (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), made by pouring thinned-down oil paint directly onto the canvas surface. She placed the unstretched fabric directly onto the floor, having been inspired by a visit to Jackson Pollock’s studio just a year earlier. These paintings were unusual and new, evocative of an avant-garde style of painting known as “Color Field” that prioritized the liquescent properties of the material itself, rather than illusionistic portrayal. Frankenthaler’s paintings nevertheless tended to evoke a sense of landscape. She often gravitated toward a horizontal format that gave the painting a “cinematic” quality, and she allowed the bare canvas to infuse her work with an airy feeling of light and atmosphere.
In October 1976, Frankenthaler attended Willem de Kooning’s exhibition at Xavier Fourcade Gallery in New York, where he exhibited Whose Name Was Writ in Water (1975, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) for the first time. De Kooning sometimes mixed his oil paint with safflower oil, whipping them into an almost fluffy consistency, and these big, fluid abstractions may have encouraged Frankenthaler to embrace different textures and paint applications in addition to her iconic soak-stain technique.
Toward the end of 1977, Frankenthaler witnessed another exhibit, this time featuring Cezanne’s late paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. Of particular interest to the artist were Cezanne’s paintings of geological stratifications. In his paintings of rocks and trees, and in depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne seemed to layer up the colors in horizontal stacks (not unlike the horizontal banding in the upper register of Basin). The venerable art historian John Elderfield has recently summarized these influences in his lengthy and informative monograph on the artist.
Also of note is the influence of Frankenthaler’s one-time teacher, Hans Hofmann, and his push/pull technique. As in Basin, Frankenthaler experimented with a kind of pulled slab technique — almost like a brushstroke that has been stretched and drawn out until the brush runs dry – which is visible in the upper register. She also dramatically increased the scale of her paintings, many of which maintain a large horizontal format (which inevitably refer back to the great landscape traditions of the 19th Century). All of these influences seemed to summarize what John Elderfield observed, that in the late 1970s, Frankenthaler “began a productive period of very generous paintings” (J. Elderfield, Ibid., p. 302).