B oasting sensuous hues of magenta, deep blue, and teal, Helen Frankenthaler’s Invoke exquisitely captures the emotional power and painterly bravura that has established the artist as one of the most innovative and accomplished Color Field painters. Impressively scaled, the work's expansive, saturated colors appear as strikingly spontaneous as they are carefully controlled. A product of Frankenthaler’s move towards visible gesture and mark-making seen later in her career, the present work, executed in 1984, is rife with surface variation and the soaked stains for which she is most famous. The lyrical orchestration of flowing pigments and splatters that comprise Invoke thus exemplifies the artist’s mature mastery of color and line while producing complex rhythmic compositions with swirling velocity.
"A line, a color, shapes, spaces, all do one thing for and within themselves, and yet do something else, in relation to everything that is going on within the four sides [of the canvas]. A line is a line, but [also] is a color. . . . It does this here, but that there. The canvas surface is flat and yet the space extends for miles. What a lie, what trickery—how beautiful is the very idea of painting."
Contextualizing this mode of working as a means of producing abstract climates, Frankenthaler pursued a painterly strategy that relied on softened, ambiguous forms imbued with atmospheric spatial presence. Invoke is a testament to Frankenthaler’s innovative and charismatic approach to painting, particularly in the 1980s. Still on the high of a period of leading success in the mid- to late-1970s, Frankenthaler enhanced her practice with even further complexity and dynamism; she infused clumps of pigment within the spills of saturated color, demonstrating a more painterly approach to applying pigment to the canvas. This new approach to painting was, in many ways, a mélange of her varied methods that had come before: “In 1982 she impulsively, even frantically, explores many new [options] that, while derived and developed from earlier ones, begin a more drastic overhauling of the possibilities of her art than before” (John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, pp. 334-335). As a more mature artist, Frankenthaler makes space for experimentation and liberates her approach to the canvas, even further entrenching her oeuvre in the values that guide her practice.
In many ways, Frankenthaler’s practice in the 1980s echoes her early works, which marked a departure from the mainstream mythic narrative and style of Abstract Expressionism. While in her paintings of the 1970s, she aimed to reflect the metaphysical and the emotional, in the 1980s, she returned attention to the interplay of formal elements, bringing focus to the surface of the canvas itself. In Invoke, dancing lines of pigment run parallel to each other, echoing the saturated expanses of paint. These gestures produce forms both delicate and powerful, rich yet luminous, an effect playing with the consciousness of space.
“Metaphors are uncovered in the making of these works. But the artist does not paint metaphors. Part of the force of these works is undoubtedly metaphorical. Their forms evoke different but similar forms and they allow of our visual substitutions. But another part of their force, and I think the larger part, resists such substitutions, at least checks them. We cannot forget how literally themselves these forms are, not only because they are tangible and individual (this is not always the case in Frankenthaler’s art), but also because they so belong where they do."
To maximize the expressive potential of each hue, their marked fluidity is sometimes interrupted by drops and areas of concentrated paint, which are executed in contrasting tones or sit in high relief on the canvas, or both, as in the case of the bright green dot and corresponding splatters which closely center the present work. These thicker areas are characteristic of Frankenthaler’s mature phase; they call attention to the disjunction between surface and paint and remind the viewer of the inherent flatness of the canvas and medium used to create the illusion of depth and space.
Frankenthaler’s method of pouring diluted acrylic paint onto the unprimed, unstretched canvas largely inspired the Color Field movement on the whole. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, both little-known artists at the time, visited her studio in 1953 and were inspired by Frankenthaler’s departure from the narrative of Abstract Expressionism of the period, dominated by an active, masculine energy. The Color Field school, rather, opted for the pure beauty of color on the canvas, and did not fully separate themselves from conceptual approaches to painting.
“My feeling [is] that a successful abstract painting plays with space on all different levels, different speeds, with different perspectives, and at the same time remains flat...for me the most beautiful pictures of any age have this ambiguity.”
With its breathtaking rhythm, Invoke bears witness to a moment of both investigation and innovation in Frankenthaler’s practice. Throughout the many chapters within her oeuvre, Frankenthaler, above all, demonstrates what it truly means to evoke emotions entwined with appreciation for the formal qualities of painting. By harnessing the fluid nature of her signature thinned paint and combining it with a newfound interest in painterly strokes, Frankenthaler imbues her canvas with a startling complexity and vibrancy with surface transitions ranging from brilliant radiance to soft suggestions. Taken together, these elements establish Invoke as a culmination of Frankenthaler’s mastery over the elusive and most fundamental elements of painting.
