‘I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes, worlds and distances held on a flat surface.’ [2] Helen Frankenthaler, 1957
In the 1950s in particular, the landscape references in her paintings alternate between subtle and explicit, as the critic E. C. Goossen noted in 1958.[2] The painting The Bay from 1957 serves as a good example. The dominant colour area is a large, irregular blue on the left side, while on the right and above, dynamic brushstrokes in bright yellow, ochre and bold red create a stark contrast. These colours seem to combine in a blazing swirl. The painting is composed of different layers, which sometimes come to the fore and sometimes open up the pictorial space to the rear. This ambivalence ensures that the painting is constantly in motion. The result is a billowing representation of the eponymous bay, a dynamic landscape of colour fields in which the various elements enter into a dialogue without defining clear forms or lines.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011)
The Bay, 1957
Currently exhibited: Yes (Gallery: Painting as a Home)
Material: Oil on canvas
Size: 36 x 41 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_423
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Copyright: Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York
Keywords:
Sale: André Emmerich Gallery, New York; Sale: Everett Ellin Gallery, Los Angeles; Previous owner: unknown, 1958
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, 2018
[1] Helen Frankenthaler, 1957, in Young America 1957: Thirty American Painters and Sculptors under Thirty-Five, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1957, n.p.
[2] Goossen seems to say that the references to landscape are oblique (‘Frankenthaler’s paintings are mostly landscapes of an order difficult to apprehend at once though by no means intentionally obscure’), but that in a previous era she might have been a landscape painter, ‘a Claude, Constable or Watteau’. See E. C. Goossen, ‘Helen Frankenthaler,’ Wall Street Journal, 21 February 1958, p. 154.
