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Lot Essay
"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image... that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute." - Helen Frankenthaler
Measuring over seven-feet in length, Cloud Harbor is an alluring example of Helen Frankenthaler’s pioneering oeuvre of abstract painting. Executed in 1974, the present work’s cascading planes of color descending into a tenor haze of gold is exemplary of the celebrated painter’s rich depth and cosmic light that define the artist’s most desired decade.
Indeed, Frankenthaler’s mature technique of thin washes of acrylic comes to a luminous crescendo in a flash of radiant white encompassed by pronounced strokes of sunset orange and a fog of flushed pink. Swallowed by pours of veiled golden paint, the artist’s chosen colors provide a sense of atmosphere through Frankenthaler’s handling of medium and her ability to achieve a sublime sense of limitlessness in composition.
Influenced heavily by Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, Frankenthaler’s legacy is preserved as a link between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Having burst onto the art scene in 1952 with her most pivotal work, Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler debuted what would become her signature style: great washes of diluted color that tumble and spill, capturing incident and then merging chaos and control. Free from the restrictions of easel painting, Frankenthaler thinned her paint down with turpentine to create translucent areas of color that soaked into the raw canvas on the floor.
“She gained what watercolorists had always had freedom to make her gesture live on the canvas with stunning directness” (E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 2000, p. 218). Like the prolific British seascape painter J.M.W. Turner, Frankenthaler conjures the sublime in her paintings through a use of color so profound that it evokes psychological ambiguities. In Lawrence Gowing’s own words on Turner: “Water gave some of its meaning to watercolour. The wetness of the medium had fateful connotations. The colour of clouds, and eventually all colour, soaked out into it, bleeding and drowning. The wonder and terror of the moment are arrested and preserved... The uncontrollable hazards of watercolor were the meaning of Turner’s private imaginative life. [but] He was at home with them and trusted them...” Similar to Turner’s watercolors and studies of light speckled with pure pigment, Cloud Harbor reveals an underlying landscape through paintings’ most basic and pristine qualities – pure, transparent color. Allowing her works to exist as layered w ashes of diaphanous pigment, Frankenthaler brought attention to the literal paint to transparently convey the visual qualities of depth and body. This break from Abstract Expressionism was endorsed by the preeminent critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, when he coined the term Post-Painterly Abstraction in the 1960s as a way to describe the merging of paint and canvas so exemplified by Frankenthaler and like-minded artists.
By 1974, Frankenthaler had made strides in both her professional and personal life. In 1969, the artist was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, in 1970, she closed her 83rd Street studio after a decade working there, and in 1971 she divorced from Robert Motherwell after thirteen years of marriage. Her professional successes combined with these emotional events lead her to produce a body of work in the early and mid-1970s that is noticeably more intense and expressive in nature, shifting her style from hard edged, free floating colorful forms to vast spaces of rich depth.
Art historian Barbara Rose noted that Frankenthaler’s works from this period were “...not merely beautiful. They are statements of great intensity and significance about what it is to stay alive, to face crisis and survive, to accept maturity with grace and even joy" (B. Rose, Frankenthaler, New York, 1972, pp. 105-106). Her interest in exploring new avenues for expression speaks to the artist’s tireless practice and its inextricable link to her daily life. In the artist’s own words, “truth comes when one is totally involved in the act of painting... somehow using everything one knows about painting materials, dreams, and feelings. Consciously and unconsciously, the artist allows what must happen to happen. That act connects you to yourself and gives you hope... The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes paintings unique and necessary” (H. Frankenthaler quoted in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1950-59, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 46).
More than any artist of the period, Helen Frankenthaler painted atmospheres, auras, or as she has said, the “effects” of things. “My pictures are full of climates,” she said, “abstract climates, and not nature per se. But a feeling. And the feeling of an order that is associated with nature” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted by J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 355). Cloud Harbor exhibits the artist’s more painterly attention to brushwork and all-over composition, revealing a new body of work evocative of atmospheres, infused with light from within. The sheer visual impact of her work is made all the more consuming when stoked by the artist’s fervor and expertise, cementing Frankenthaler as a true pillar of 20th century American painting.
Measuring over seven-feet in length, Cloud Harbor is an alluring example of Helen Frankenthaler’s pioneering oeuvre of abstract painting. Executed in 1974, the present work’s cascading planes of color descending into a tenor haze of gold is exemplary of the celebrated painter’s rich depth and cosmic light that define the artist’s most desired decade.
Indeed, Frankenthaler’s mature technique of thin washes of acrylic comes to a luminous crescendo in a flash of radiant white encompassed by pronounced strokes of sunset orange and a fog of flushed pink. Swallowed by pours of veiled golden paint, the artist’s chosen colors provide a sense of atmosphere through Frankenthaler’s handling of medium and her ability to achieve a sublime sense of limitlessness in composition.
Influenced heavily by Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, Frankenthaler’s legacy is preserved as a link between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Having burst onto the art scene in 1952 with her most pivotal work, Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler debuted what would become her signature style: great washes of diluted color that tumble and spill, capturing incident and then merging chaos and control. Free from the restrictions of easel painting, Frankenthaler thinned her paint down with turpentine to create translucent areas of color that soaked into the raw canvas on the floor.
“She gained what watercolorists had always had freedom to make her gesture live on the canvas with stunning directness” (E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 2000, p. 218). Like the prolific British seascape painter J.M.W. Turner, Frankenthaler conjures the sublime in her paintings through a use of color so profound that it evokes psychological ambiguities. In Lawrence Gowing’s own words on Turner: “Water gave some of its meaning to watercolour. The wetness of the medium had fateful connotations. The colour of clouds, and eventually all colour, soaked out into it, bleeding and drowning. The wonder and terror of the moment are arrested and preserved... The uncontrollable hazards of watercolor were the meaning of Turner’s private imaginative life. [but] He was at home with them and trusted them...” Similar to Turner’s watercolors and studies of light speckled with pure pigment, Cloud Harbor reveals an underlying landscape through paintings’ most basic and pristine qualities – pure, transparent color. Allowing her works to exist as layered w ashes of diaphanous pigment, Frankenthaler brought attention to the literal paint to transparently convey the visual qualities of depth and body. This break from Abstract Expressionism was endorsed by the preeminent critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, when he coined the term Post-Painterly Abstraction in the 1960s as a way to describe the merging of paint and canvas so exemplified by Frankenthaler and like-minded artists.
By 1974, Frankenthaler had made strides in both her professional and personal life. In 1969, the artist was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, in 1970, she closed her 83rd Street studio after a decade working there, and in 1971 she divorced from Robert Motherwell after thirteen years of marriage. Her professional successes combined with these emotional events lead her to produce a body of work in the early and mid-1970s that is noticeably more intense and expressive in nature, shifting her style from hard edged, free floating colorful forms to vast spaces of rich depth.
Art historian Barbara Rose noted that Frankenthaler’s works from this period were “...not merely beautiful. They are statements of great intensity and significance about what it is to stay alive, to face crisis and survive, to accept maturity with grace and even joy" (B. Rose, Frankenthaler, New York, 1972, pp. 105-106). Her interest in exploring new avenues for expression speaks to the artist’s tireless practice and its inextricable link to her daily life. In the artist’s own words, “truth comes when one is totally involved in the act of painting... somehow using everything one knows about painting materials, dreams, and feelings. Consciously and unconsciously, the artist allows what must happen to happen. That act connects you to yourself and gives you hope... The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes paintings unique and necessary” (H. Frankenthaler quoted in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1950-59, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 46).
More than any artist of the period, Helen Frankenthaler painted atmospheres, auras, or as she has said, the “effects” of things. “My pictures are full of climates,” she said, “abstract climates, and not nature per se. But a feeling. And the feeling of an order that is associated with nature” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted by J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 355). Cloud Harbor exhibits the artist’s more painterly attention to brushwork and all-over composition, revealing a new body of work evocative of atmospheres, infused with light from within. The sheer visual impact of her work is made all the more consuming when stoked by the artist’s fervor and expertise, cementing Frankenthaler as a true pillar of 20th century American painting.