Helen Frankenthaler

André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Christie's, New York, 8 May 1984, Lot 21
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Helen Frankenthaler: An Exhibition of New Paintings, October 1966, illustrated in the exhibition brochure 
Los Angeles, Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Helen Frankenthaler, March - April 1967
Detroit, Gertrude Kasle Gallery, Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings, April - May 1967 

Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler, New York 1970, no. 162, illustrated 
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York 1988, p. 189, illustrated 

This work is in good condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Department at (212) 606-7254 for a professional condition report prepared by Amman+Estabrook Conservation. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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"The trio of 1966 pictures, Three Color Space, Four Color Space, and Five Color Space, suggests that part of what she meant was that she would now explore pictorial concepts in painting and thereby discover pictures rather than consciously, separately compose each individual work. The titles of these pictures explain their motivation. Their realization makes no concession to the idea that a work of art should be a carefully nurtured and modulated complex of parts harmoniously combined: they are uncompromising, even brash pictures."
Jonn Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York 1988, pp. 189-202 

In Helen Frankenthaler’s Four Color Space from 1966, richly saturated pools of color bleed off the edges of the canvas, flooding the peripheral membrane of the picture plane in four sensationally organic and atmospheric puddles of color. Particularly special is the manner in which Frankenthaler has left the center of the canvas untouched, actively recalling the powerful open-centered formats of Morris Louis’s Unfurleds of the early 1960s. Having cultivated her signature canvas staining technique by pouring paint onto large unstretched, unprimed canvases laid on the floor, Frankenthaler then began to experiment in 1965 with the idea of “cropping” the picture after the canvas had been painted–thus discovering and determining the composition through a retroactive process. In the present work, Frankenthaler’s cropping technique reigns supreme, as we are given the sense that the picture is flooded from the inside-out, with paint flowing past the borders of the canvas in infinite capacity. 

The year 1966 was marked not only by Frankenthaler’s nascent investigations into new compositional cropping techniques, but also by the mutual convergence of her work towards that of her husband Robert Motherwell. In 1966 Motherwell first initiated his series characterized by expansive color fields that explored dualities of presence and absence, a series that would officially be called the Open paintings and constitute his largest body of work. Comparable to Motherwell, Frankenthaler demonstrates in Four Color Space an undeniable quality of measured restraint rooted in the simplification of her visual vocabulary to basic geometric elements. Four Color Space embraces modulated emptiness at the center of the composition in favor of activated color fields around the margins that exude with centrifugal force into an existential continuum. A paragon of Frankenthaler’s beloved stained canvases from her early career, the present work revels in the arresting synergy of color forms that never blend but rather meld at the contours in an utterly breathtaking fashion.