Helen Frankenthaler

Collection of Hester Hyde Griffin, Pebble Beach
Christie's, New York, May 10, 2000, Lot 698
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

The Art Institute of Chicago, Sixty Sixth Annual American Exhibition, January - February 1963, no. 19
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Hannover, Orangerie Herrenhausen; Berlin, USIS, Helen Frankenthaler, February - October 1969, p. 42, illustrated

Barbara Rose, "Painting Within Tradition: The Career of Helen Frankenthaler," Artforum, April 1969, p. 28, illustrated
Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler, New York, 1972, no. 113, illustrated
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York. 1989, p. 158, illustrated

“[In Frankenthaler’s work] we discover shapes that either confirm our experience of the world or reveal to us worlds the like of which we had not previously known… The world’s anatomy in invoked in these pictures: the organic rhymes and relationships of its parts and the geometry and clarity of its whole… The very form of a picture like Arcadia recalls the Romanticist idea of a work of art as a living organic entity, like a tree.”

-         John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, 1989, p. 154

Arcadia shows Helen Frankenthaler as an artist who has come into her own as the pre-eminent figure of Color Field painting.  An artist not merely following in the footsteps of those that had come before her, Frankenthaler blazed a new path, creating a new visual aesthetic and establishing herself as a highly individual (and successful) artist.  In the beginning stages of her career, Frankenthaler would struggle to reconcile her early foundations with a growing impulse to push beyond the Cubist boundaries and subsume the growing influences of Pollock, Gorky and de Kooning.

Arcadia, referring to the pastoral ideal of the Greek countryside or an imaginary paradise, is an apt tile for so beautiful a composition.  Frankenthaler’s imagery is intimately dependent upon her working method.  Working in the oil stain technique, Frankenthaler saturated her paints with turpentine or kerosene, allowing the pigmented liquid to soak into the unprimed canvas, leaving a stain of color surrounded by a halo of turpentine.  Frankenthaler produced a series of paintings in the early 1960s with Rorschach-like blots centered on the unprimed canvas.  Making active use of the raw canvas, the organic, abstract shapes create an atmospheric illusion that is heightened by the presence of halos, a by-product of the artist’s technique.  Speaking of her work, Frankenthaler describes: “I am involved in making pictures ‘hold’ an explosive gesture, something that is moving in and out of landscape like depths but lies flat in local area – intact but not confined.” (John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p.99) Arcadia embodies “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.”  (Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler, New York, 1975, p. 14)