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Lot Essay
"Action painting implies a kind of running across the canvas, a sort of Hansel and Gretel trail of physical action." - Helen Frankenthaler
A soaring canvas defined by a deep sensitivity to color and form, Helen Frankenthaler’s Hansel and Gretel is an exemplar of the artist’s radical “soak-stain” technique. Executed in 1975, the work was acquired by the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro that same year, evidence of a decades-long friendship between the two artists through which each pushed and inspired the other. A delicate trail of paw prints which runs playfully across the surface of the work is alluded to in its title, a reference to the classic fairy tale in which children follow trails of pebbles and breadcrumbs through dense forest. Frankenthaler has said that “early on, painting alone wasn’t my primary pursuit. Writing was just as important. I valued the written word, the book, the conversation, the making up of stories … I would get lost in the worlds of words and paint in every conceivable way” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in J. Brown, After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 29). In the present work this drive towards storytelling and worldmaking is combined with post-Greenbergian formal concerns. “Action painting implies a kind of running across the canvas, a sort of Hansel and Gretel trail of physical action,” she suggested towards the end of her life (ibid, p. 45). Hansel and Gretel displays the gestural, painterly quality which defines the artist’s work of the 1970s. A pivotal figure within the celebrated second wave of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler’s assured manipulation of pigment, such that it hovers between piercing luminosity and almost absorbent density, beckons the viewer into her radiant painted world.
Laying the unsized, unprimed canvas on the studio floor, Frankenthaler would soak pigment thinned with turpentine into its warp and weft. Against large sections of raw canvas emerge the traces of Frankenthaler’s embodied working process, as she intuitively poured, trailed and brushed rich, verdant pigments across its surface. Subaqueous greens dominate the palette of the work, juxtaposed against a lucid swathe of ochre which traverses the horizontal length of the canvas, and swatches of crisp primary colors. The thinned paint seeps amorphously, so that neighboring pigments bleed into one another, while at the same time the use of acrylic retains a striking chromatic depth. “I have been drawn to water and translucency” she explains. “I love the water; I love to swim, to watch changing seascapes” (ibid, p. 41). At this time in the 1970s Frankenthaler was looking at Claude Monet’s use of color, explaining that his late Giverny bridge scenes helped her to see how “a dark painting can burst with light” (ibid, p. 42).
Executed in close proximity to the sea, Hansel and Gretel was painted in the summer of 1975 at Shippan Point in Stamford, Connecticut. There, Frankenthaler converted the living room of her rental home on Ocean Drive West into a studio, so that as she worked, she could look out through its large windows across the Long Island Sound. Like Jackson Pollock she placed her canvas on the studio floor, often rotating it during and even after the painting process. Rotated horizontally, the present work captures an echo of the seascape framed by the windows, its linear composition evoking receding strata of land, sea and sky, and the impression of a bright white sun descending towards the horizon. “On Ocean Drive West you are always staring at horizon lines—horizon lines that vary” explained Frankenthaler. “There are hazed-out parts of Long Island across the Sound, parts of it can be visible, parts not ... I wasn’t looking at nature or seascape but at the drawing within nature” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 2024, p. 286).
In Hansel and Gretel, expanses of bare canvas contain a kind of quiet vastness, an acknowledgment of the infinite space entrusted to the picture plane. The relationship between positive and negative space is something Frankenthaler had been exploring in the lead up to the execution of this work. For her, negative space was not empty but held its own shape, an active part of the wider composition. In 1974 she began experimenting with a “reverse drawing” method, painting over masking tape laid down on canvas, which when later removed revealed crisp, portal like strips of bare canvas within the final composition. Hansel and Gretel, with its dramatic sequence of painted verticals, involved an evolution of this process. A photograph of the work unrolled in Frankenthaler’s New York City studio on East 83rd Street shows that she also cropped the canvas prior to stretching, removing a panel along one edge of the composition.
These almost sculptural manipulations of the picture plane hint at the dialogue and reciprocal influence between Frankenthaler and her sculptor friends and contemporaries such as David Smith, and Anne Truitt, and of course Caro. A few years before the present work was executed, she visited Caro’s London studio and produced a series of sculptural works which helped her to see how “frequently, the problems and workings of painting and sculpture are the same” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2024, p. 179). Caro felt similarly, reflecting many years later on the parallels between their work: “Bang—there it is. It’s a big painting but it’s painted like a watercolor. That sort of directness is something that I share with her—trying to get your feelings to come straight through without a lot of barriers” (A. Caro, “True Colours”, The Observer, 4 June 2000).
The early to mid 1970s was a time of enormous critical recognition and acclaim for Frankenthaler, providing an opportunity for the artist to reflect on the trajectory of her work. Her first retrospective exhibition had been staged in 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and was subsequently followed by the compilation of the first full scale publication on her oeuvre, by Barbara Rose. Buoyed by these moments of reconnection with her work of the 1950s, it was a time of both reminiscence and innovation for the artist. Drawing—so integral to early works such as her 1952 breakthrough masterpiece Mountains and Sea—returned as an important aspect of her practice, yet within Frankenthaler’s mature oeuvre drawing was less graphic in quality and more concerned with “the shapes of the colors” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, p. 39). From 1973 she also began to produce large, mesmerizing woodcut prints which sharpened her sensibility to the layering of pigment. Executed a few years later, Hansel and Gretel’s bold, calligraphic forms capture the sense of drawing through color which Frankenthaler honed across these years, and which has come to define her profoundly singular contribution to abstraction.
A soaring canvas defined by a deep sensitivity to color and form, Helen Frankenthaler’s Hansel and Gretel is an exemplar of the artist’s radical “soak-stain” technique. Executed in 1975, the work was acquired by the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro that same year, evidence of a decades-long friendship between the two artists through which each pushed and inspired the other. A delicate trail of paw prints which runs playfully across the surface of the work is alluded to in its title, a reference to the classic fairy tale in which children follow trails of pebbles and breadcrumbs through dense forest. Frankenthaler has said that “early on, painting alone wasn’t my primary pursuit. Writing was just as important. I valued the written word, the book, the conversation, the making up of stories … I would get lost in the worlds of words and paint in every conceivable way” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in J. Brown, After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 29). In the present work this drive towards storytelling and worldmaking is combined with post-Greenbergian formal concerns. “Action painting implies a kind of running across the canvas, a sort of Hansel and Gretel trail of physical action,” she suggested towards the end of her life (ibid, p. 45). Hansel and Gretel displays the gestural, painterly quality which defines the artist’s work of the 1970s. A pivotal figure within the celebrated second wave of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler’s assured manipulation of pigment, such that it hovers between piercing luminosity and almost absorbent density, beckons the viewer into her radiant painted world.
Laying the unsized, unprimed canvas on the studio floor, Frankenthaler would soak pigment thinned with turpentine into its warp and weft. Against large sections of raw canvas emerge the traces of Frankenthaler’s embodied working process, as she intuitively poured, trailed and brushed rich, verdant pigments across its surface. Subaqueous greens dominate the palette of the work, juxtaposed against a lucid swathe of ochre which traverses the horizontal length of the canvas, and swatches of crisp primary colors. The thinned paint seeps amorphously, so that neighboring pigments bleed into one another, while at the same time the use of acrylic retains a striking chromatic depth. “I have been drawn to water and translucency” she explains. “I love the water; I love to swim, to watch changing seascapes” (ibid, p. 41). At this time in the 1970s Frankenthaler was looking at Claude Monet’s use of color, explaining that his late Giverny bridge scenes helped her to see how “a dark painting can burst with light” (ibid, p. 42).
Executed in close proximity to the sea, Hansel and Gretel was painted in the summer of 1975 at Shippan Point in Stamford, Connecticut. There, Frankenthaler converted the living room of her rental home on Ocean Drive West into a studio, so that as she worked, she could look out through its large windows across the Long Island Sound. Like Jackson Pollock she placed her canvas on the studio floor, often rotating it during and even after the painting process. Rotated horizontally, the present work captures an echo of the seascape framed by the windows, its linear composition evoking receding strata of land, sea and sky, and the impression of a bright white sun descending towards the horizon. “On Ocean Drive West you are always staring at horizon lines—horizon lines that vary” explained Frankenthaler. “There are hazed-out parts of Long Island across the Sound, parts of it can be visible, parts not ... I wasn’t looking at nature or seascape but at the drawing within nature” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in J. Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 2024, p. 286).
In Hansel and Gretel, expanses of bare canvas contain a kind of quiet vastness, an acknowledgment of the infinite space entrusted to the picture plane. The relationship between positive and negative space is something Frankenthaler had been exploring in the lead up to the execution of this work. For her, negative space was not empty but held its own shape, an active part of the wider composition. In 1974 she began experimenting with a “reverse drawing” method, painting over masking tape laid down on canvas, which when later removed revealed crisp, portal like strips of bare canvas within the final composition. Hansel and Gretel, with its dramatic sequence of painted verticals, involved an evolution of this process. A photograph of the work unrolled in Frankenthaler’s New York City studio on East 83rd Street shows that she also cropped the canvas prior to stretching, removing a panel along one edge of the composition.
These almost sculptural manipulations of the picture plane hint at the dialogue and reciprocal influence between Frankenthaler and her sculptor friends and contemporaries such as David Smith, and Anne Truitt, and of course Caro. A few years before the present work was executed, she visited Caro’s London studio and produced a series of sculptural works which helped her to see how “frequently, the problems and workings of painting and sculpture are the same” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, exh. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2024, p. 179). Caro felt similarly, reflecting many years later on the parallels between their work: “Bang—there it is. It’s a big painting but it’s painted like a watercolor. That sort of directness is something that I share with her—trying to get your feelings to come straight through without a lot of barriers” (A. Caro, “True Colours”, The Observer, 4 June 2000).
The early to mid 1970s was a time of enormous critical recognition and acclaim for Frankenthaler, providing an opportunity for the artist to reflect on the trajectory of her work. Her first retrospective exhibition had been staged in 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and was subsequently followed by the compilation of the first full scale publication on her oeuvre, by Barbara Rose. Buoyed by these moments of reconnection with her work of the 1950s, it was a time of both reminiscence and innovation for the artist. Drawing—so integral to early works such as her 1952 breakthrough masterpiece Mountains and Sea—returned as an important aspect of her practice, yet within Frankenthaler’s mature oeuvre drawing was less graphic in quality and more concerned with “the shapes of the colors” (H. Frankenthaler, quoted in Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, p. 39). From 1973 she also began to produce large, mesmerizing woodcut prints which sharpened her sensibility to the layering of pigment. Executed a few years later, Hansel and Gretel’s bold, calligraphic forms capture the sense of drawing through color which Frankenthaler honed across these years, and which has come to define her profoundly singular contribution to abstraction.