She turned face down the stretched canvases on her studio floor ... pried them off the next day, unstretched them, then saw on their reverse sides the familiar sight of softly disembodied color surprisingly trapped in the imprint of the floorboards. She subsequently added more opaque, intense areas to sharpen the softness — usually to frame it — and thereby produced extremely commanding, stately works that unquestionably bear her mark and affirm her stylistic continuity."
Vibrant and organic, April from 1963 is an exemplary work from one of the most experimental and pivotal moments in Helen Frankenthaler’s oeuvre. As described by the artist herself, “Wild experiments and surprises” were taking place in her studio, where she had begun exploring acrylic paint and composing with paint rather than with line. (Letter from Helen Frankenthaler to Grace Hartigan, May 20, 1963. Syracuse University Libraries) The linear, gestural forms that defined her paintings in the late 1950s were transformed into pure color as, inspired by the bolder, more simplified forms and colors of Pop, as well as by up-and-coming Color Field artists, Frankenthaler sought to drastically change her practice. From this effort came one of the most clearly identifiable series in her body of work: the so-called “floorboard” paintings, which bear traces of the wooden floors in her New York which bear traces of the wooden floors in her New York studio on East 83rd Street and 3rd Avenue.
Helen Frankenthaler Paintings from 1963 in Museum Collections
Held in prestigious collections worldwide, these paintings resulted from a reconsideration of an earlier experiment with heavy pours of paint onto the surfaces of stretched canvases, which she had laid aside on the floor. Later, she noticed “the back was not loaded, but just sort of a stained memory of what I’d overworked on the other side. And I built up a picture around the part that had come through.” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Helen Frankenthaler, Composing with Color: Paintings 1962-1963, 2014, p. 19) This technique produced a result described by art historian Barbara Rose as “creating a mysteriously hazy image of mists and transparent vapors,” with floating compositions that recall the early work of Mark Rothko (Ibid.).
RIGHT: Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1949. Collection of Kate Rothko Prizel. ART © KATE ROTHKO PRIZEL AND CHRISTOPHER ROTHKO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.
Frankenthaler gave these watery, amorphous paintings organic names: Moat, Yolk, Thaw, April. In April, the cool purple and blue evoke the rains of spring, and the vibrant coral and vibrant yellow are a reminder of the rebirth associated with the season. Within the center of the work sits a quietly exploding star. A nebulous yellow form surrounds a red-tinged cloud of white and blue, with greens, purples, and pinks staining its halo. Above and below, raw sections of unprimed canvas peak around the imprints of the floorboards of her studio. The striations, the “stained memory” of the floorboards, are the only non-organic aspects of this dynamic composition. She is closer here to the “total color image” that would become the hallmark of her later work than in most paintings from this period, and April’s energy is enthralling.
Tate Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY
Other works from this period in the early 1960s, which was recently the focus of the 2014 Gagosian exhibition Helen Frankenthaler: Composing with Color: Paintings 1962 – 1963, which are held in such prestigious collections as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. This deeply experimental period in her practice makes April even more exciting: it is both a prototype and a bridge between two distinct chapters in her oeuvre. A pivotal work from an extraordinary moment, and a key part from a limited suite of "floorboard paintings", April embodies Frankenthaler’s commitment to exploration and embrace of both the arbitrary and intended in the early 1960s.
