Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler created Green Moon (1984) ten years after the death of Adolph Gottlieb— a respectful homage to the artist who, in 1950, gave her the opportunity to participate in her first exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Thirty-eight years later, she draws on elements from Gottlieb’s famous Burst series in this work, characterized by two distinct zones: an upper area with a central circular form and a lower area with gestural bursts of colour. Gottlieb regarded this as a visual formula representing the polarities that define the universe—chaos and harmony, above and below. His works, such as Istanbul (1971) from the Reinhard Ernst Collection, were designed to have immediate impact, requiring no gradual decoding.
In Green Moon, Frankenthaler echoes these polarities but embeds them within a fluid red colour field. Below the green circular form, orange and pink pigments appear as saturated clusters of paint on the canvas. Five years later, during her major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she explained to curator E.A. Carmean: ‘Anything that has beauty and provides order (rather than chaos or shock alone), anything resolved in a picture (as in nature) gives pleasure—a sense of rightness, as in being one with nature.’ [1]

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011)

Green Moon, 1984

Currently exhibited: Yes (Gallery: Painting as a Home)

Material: Acrylic paint on canvas
Size: 160.3 x 118.5 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_590
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Copyright: Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York