Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian: Imagining Landscapes

Ina

Jul 10, 2021

3 min read

Updated: Oct 6

Gagosian's gallery on Grosvenor Hill showed thirteen Helen Frankenthaler paintings from 17 June to 18 September 2021. The show was due to close on 27 August, and the gallery extended it.

This page is a record of Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian: the paintings, the soak-stain technique behind them, and where her work can be seen in London now. For other Mayfair galleries, see my pages on Bond Street and Annely Juda Fine Art.

Orange Hem, 1971: a large blue field inside a border of orange and yellow, hung on a pale gallery wall

Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian: What Was in the Show?

The show was called Imagining Landscapes: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1976. All thirteen paintings came from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and several had not been shown before. Gagosian published a catalogue with an essay by the art historian Robert Slifkin.

The works ran from a panoramic canvas of 1952 to Sphinx, painted in 1976. In between were canvases from her honeymoon in southwest France with the painter Robert Motherwell, and four from 1961: Fable, Beach Scene, Square Figure and After Rubens.

Orange Hem, painted in 1971, is the blue canvas at the top of this page. Jonathan Jones reviewed the show for the Guardian on 18 June 2021, and his headline compared the paintings to a Rothko dancing wildly to jazz.

What Is the Soak-Stain Technique?

Frankenthaler painted her first soak-stain picture, Mountains and Sea, in 1952, after a summer trip to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. She laid unprimed canvas on the studio floor and poured oil paint thinned with turpentine onto it.

The colour sank into the weave instead of sitting on top. That is why her canvases look stained, not painted, and why the colour seems to belong to the cloth.

What Did the 1961 Paintings Show?

Gagosian's press release says the four canvases of 1961 show her drawing becoming more calligraphic, without losing the landscape or the figure behind it.

Square Figure sets a black rectangle above splashes of orange, yellow and red.

Square Figure, 1961: a black outline of a rectangle above splashes of orange, yellow and red on a white ground

Visitors stood well back from After Rubens, which is large enough to need the distance.

Three visitors standing in front of After Rubens, 1961, a large canvas of brown, blue and orange forms on a white wall

Fable puts washes of blue, orange and yellow beside spidery black lines.

Fable, 1961: blue, orange and yellow washes with black calligraphic lines on an unprimed canvas

Beach Scene keeps mostly to yellow and black, with red and blue at the edges.

Beach Scene, 1961: yellow and black shapes with red and blue at the edges of a white canvas

How Did Her Painting Change in the 1960s and 1970s?

By 1963 stained areas of colour had replaced the drawn lines. Narcissus, Yolk and Sea Goddess have cloudy, watery shapes. Gagosian's text says they invite the kind of reading Leonardo da Vinci suggested when he told painters to look for pictures in stained walls.

Narcissus, 1963: a blue-purple band and a yellow patch inside a cream shape on a teal ground

Sea Goddess, 1963: stained areas of cream, pink, yellow and blue on a teal ground, in a black frame

Cape Orange, painted in 1964, uses flatter and more opaque colour that suggests a map seen from above. Orange Hem and Red Travels, both painted in 1971, also evoke aerial views.

Cape Orange, 1964: a dark maroon block inside layers of red, orange, olive and grey

The gallery hung the paintings through a run of white rooms. Walking through them, you could follow the shift from drawn line to stained field in order.

A white gallery at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill with visitors looking at large stained canvases, the nearest in lilac, green and yellow

What Is Colour Field Painting?

Tate defines Colour Field painting as abstract art of the 1950s and 1960s built on large areas of flat colour, without the gestural brushwork of earlier abstract expressionism. The term was first applied to Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. Rothko has his own page here: Rothko at Pace Gallery.

Tate says Frankenthaler was instrumental in a purer version of the style from about 1960, alongside Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam. In 1964 the critic Clement Greenberg curated a Los Angeles exhibition that named the movement Post-Painterly Abstraction.

Where Can You See Helen Frankenthaler in London Now?

Tate Modern opened a free Frankenthaler display on 21 November 2019, built around a gift from the Foundation. The gift was Vessel, painted in 1961, which was Tate's first Frankenthaler painting. Tate's collection also holds many of her prints, and its collection search shows what is on display.

Gagosian's gallery on Grosvenor Hill is a few minutes' walk from Bond Street. Its street window shows the neighbouring brick building reflected in the glass.

The gallery's street window with an exhibition image of a figure in a jacket, overlaid by reflections of the red-brick building opposite

Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian: Practical Notes

📍 Where: Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1K 3QD.

📅 Open days: 17 June to 18 September 2021. The show was first due to close on 27 August 2021.

🎫 Admission: Free.

🚇 Getting there: Bond Street, on the Central and Elizabeth lines, is a few minutes' walk away.

🗺️ Nearby: Berkeley Square, the Bond Street shops, the Mayfair Christmas lights and the other Mayfair galleries.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.