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Lot Essay
A canvas of impressive scale and distinction, Helen Frankenthaler’s Pink Lightning displays the luminous color, lyricism, beauty and elegance that are the signature qualities of this important proponent of abstraction. Frankenthaler was an essential member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists and a crucial influence in the development of the Color Field School of painting. In her work, she gave color a new independence, allowing it to float free, untethered by representation or gesture, resulting in the expansive fields of pure color that lie at the very heart of the present work.
Pink Lightning is made up of just four essential tonalities: emerald, ochre, deep blue, and of course, the pink of the title. Alternating areas of translucence, luminosity, opacity, and staining of the unprimed canvas support provide a lively set of contrasts across the surface of the work, the colors darker in some areas, lighter in others, the varying opacity determined by the thickness of Frankenthaler’s application of paint.
In this painting, Frankenthaler creates shades-within-shades, myriad lighter and darker ochres, jades, and purple-blues within each color category, engaging and delighting the eye. Planes of color build the architecture of the work, the pigment applied with varying degrees of density, from light washes and even the occasional splash of pigment, to deeper, more heavily built-up areas. Frankenthaler’s paint technique produced waves of color, her paint not resting on top of the canvas but rather soaking into the very weave of the material, mingling with and becoming a part of it.
The title evokes natural forces, and indeed Frankenthaler sometimes made reference to climate in her titles as she did in the present work, but most often she referred to climate as a kind of feeling, not nature as such but rather emotion that evokes natural forces to suggest metaphors for states of feeling. Frankenthaler had a gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions,” observed art historian Barbara Rose (B. Rose, quoted in “Helen Frankenthaler, Back to the Future,” The New York Times, April 27, 2003).
This painting’s striking vertical orientation is accentuated by the canvas’s six-foot height, with the fields of color suggesting a strong upward reach toward the upper edge. Thin ribbons of pigment, one forest-green and one pink, flow along the left edge of the painting, alternating with unprimed canvas surfaces along the left and upper borders. A passage of ochre paint plays across the left corner. The deep midnight-blue field of color in the right portion of the canvas contrasts dramatically with the bare canvas showing along the top and extreme left edge.
Three broad planes of color occupy most of the pictorial space of the painting, their edges flowing into each other. Because it is the largest of the color fields, the clay-earth tonality seems to dominate the picture space, but its larger size is counterbalanced by the darker green and cobalt shades occupying the right third of the painting. The work seems to offer the viewer the opportunity to savor an asymmetry of shape within a larger symmetry of color balance, achieving harmony through an astute equilibrium of color combinations. The contours of the color fields define the painting’s composition. Frankenthaler often deemphasized drawing, a radical move for an artist during the early years of her career. Here is color constructed by color, not by the act of drawing. The colors do not overlap but rather align along their boundary lines, without hard edges and precise margins.
Although the painting evokes a sense of broad spaces, it would be impossible to say that one color is “on top of” another and therefore impossible to say that there is a clear foreground and background in the composition, a near and distant with an expanse in between. Here, the artist seems less interested in conveying a landscape than in showing an organization of abstracted shapes as organized by color itself.
Departing from the dramatic brushstrokes of the first generation of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler chose to emphasize the flat surface of the canvas itself over the effort to use the surface to construct an illusion of depth and in doing so, she compelled the viewer to savor the very nature of paint on canvas. Her work became an essential bridge between two enormously significant movements in mid-20th Century painting, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, offering a new way to define and use color for those artists who were to define the Minimalist movement of the sixties.
The surface of the canvas—and the play of colors across it—is Frankenthaler’s true subject. “The feeling-tone her paintings have projected has been the serene and beautiful, achieved by the insightful control over the elements of form: floating areas of color; occasional fountains, spurts, jets of color thrown against bare canvas…curtains of bright flat non-naturalistic color” (E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 2000, p. 208).
Pink Lightning is made up of just four essential tonalities: emerald, ochre, deep blue, and of course, the pink of the title. Alternating areas of translucence, luminosity, opacity, and staining of the unprimed canvas support provide a lively set of contrasts across the surface of the work, the colors darker in some areas, lighter in others, the varying opacity determined by the thickness of Frankenthaler’s application of paint.
In this painting, Frankenthaler creates shades-within-shades, myriad lighter and darker ochres, jades, and purple-blues within each color category, engaging and delighting the eye. Planes of color build the architecture of the work, the pigment applied with varying degrees of density, from light washes and even the occasional splash of pigment, to deeper, more heavily built-up areas. Frankenthaler’s paint technique produced waves of color, her paint not resting on top of the canvas but rather soaking into the very weave of the material, mingling with and becoming a part of it.
The title evokes natural forces, and indeed Frankenthaler sometimes made reference to climate in her titles as she did in the present work, but most often she referred to climate as a kind of feeling, not nature as such but rather emotion that evokes natural forces to suggest metaphors for states of feeling. Frankenthaler had a gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions,” observed art historian Barbara Rose (B. Rose, quoted in “Helen Frankenthaler, Back to the Future,” The New York Times, April 27, 2003).
This painting’s striking vertical orientation is accentuated by the canvas’s six-foot height, with the fields of color suggesting a strong upward reach toward the upper edge. Thin ribbons of pigment, one forest-green and one pink, flow along the left edge of the painting, alternating with unprimed canvas surfaces along the left and upper borders. A passage of ochre paint plays across the left corner. The deep midnight-blue field of color in the right portion of the canvas contrasts dramatically with the bare canvas showing along the top and extreme left edge.
Three broad planes of color occupy most of the pictorial space of the painting, their edges flowing into each other. Because it is the largest of the color fields, the clay-earth tonality seems to dominate the picture space, but its larger size is counterbalanced by the darker green and cobalt shades occupying the right third of the painting. The work seems to offer the viewer the opportunity to savor an asymmetry of shape within a larger symmetry of color balance, achieving harmony through an astute equilibrium of color combinations. The contours of the color fields define the painting’s composition. Frankenthaler often deemphasized drawing, a radical move for an artist during the early years of her career. Here is color constructed by color, not by the act of drawing. The colors do not overlap but rather align along their boundary lines, without hard edges and precise margins.
Although the painting evokes a sense of broad spaces, it would be impossible to say that one color is “on top of” another and therefore impossible to say that there is a clear foreground and background in the composition, a near and distant with an expanse in between. Here, the artist seems less interested in conveying a landscape than in showing an organization of abstracted shapes as organized by color itself.
Departing from the dramatic brushstrokes of the first generation of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler chose to emphasize the flat surface of the canvas itself over the effort to use the surface to construct an illusion of depth and in doing so, she compelled the viewer to savor the very nature of paint on canvas. Her work became an essential bridge between two enormously significant movements in mid-20th Century painting, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, offering a new way to define and use color for those artists who were to define the Minimalist movement of the sixties.
The surface of the canvas—and the play of colors across it—is Frankenthaler’s true subject. “The feeling-tone her paintings have projected has been the serene and beautiful, achieved by the insightful control over the elements of form: floating areas of color; occasional fountains, spurts, jets of color thrown against bare canvas…curtains of bright flat non-naturalistic color” (E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 2000, p. 208).