HELEN FRANKENTHALER AT GAGOSIAN GALLERY 2026

 

 

I got in under the wire to see the Helen Frankenthaler exhibition “The Moment and the Distance” - 22 paintings from 1960-1992 at Gagosian Gallery on 21st Street, which ended on July 2nd. Despite the intense heat, this was a show I would not miss, as I consider Frankenthaler a vicarious mentor and a major influence, along with Morris Louis, on my origins as an artist, particularly on my 1970s New Mexico poured paintings. I wrote to Frankenthaler when I came back east from New Mexico to NYC in the summer of 1969, asking if she would like an intern, and received a polite, scrawling handwritten letter on Robert Motherwell stationery saying she did not need anyone at that time.

This exhibition was a surprise - some disappointments with her late works and an exhilaration in seeing the earlier stained paintings  - the ones where her hand is not visible like a puppeteer overseeing some mysterious communion between the unprimed canvas and the paint that just appeared with a ghostlike freshness and freedom; for me it was like nothing I had ever seen before as if the paint and color were out of the artists' careful and calculating control. I felt a "thereness," and even though I still am not sure what is meant by that term, I still use that word to describe the exultation I felt.

Her colors invoke the light of time, melding and overlapping other hues through repeated pouring while allowing the rivulets of paint to flow on the canvas like gentle streams of water, sometimes dazzling or else hiding in the vast floodplains of seductive hues, giving me a feeling of unbridled abandonment.

Detail of painting above

I wish I had a checklist so I could reference titles, but I believe around the 1980’s Frankenthaler begins to bring her hand back into the work; there is a sensual desire to touch a painting with a brush or trowel or whatever means, constructing an extrusion of texture and gesture. There is a large white painting that I thought was extremely compelling, beautifully constructed and now burrowed into my being  - a work which my mind and heart will not relinquish, showing what Frankenthaler accomplished when she became the author of experimentation and development.

On the other hand, in the 1990s some of the paintings reveal a woman who was trying to work with new ideas by looking at the past and her contemporaries. Some of the works reminded me of Adolph Gottlieb, Richard Diebenkorn, and Hans Hoffman. Static squares and rectangles and blobby circles seem arbitrary and do not speak to one another but float aimlessly over her color grounds. No longer did the forms bob and weave, but rather felt contrived, sensing that they struggled to move and were locked into position.  And then, to my delight, a painting appears that has the complexity/simplicity and passion of a wonderful work of art. 

I am so fortunate that I was able to see this show, though the artworks are just a glimpse of what Helen Frankenthaler has accomplished. And of course, the importance of her influence on many younger artists who were able to feel the immediacy of great paintings.

                                      Detail of above painting