1. Helen Frankenthaler, Moat, 1963 (detail), oil on canvas, 711 2 × 49 inches (181.6 ×124.5 cm)
Helen Frankenthaler
Composing with Color:
Paintings 1962–1963
Organized in collaboration with the newly established Helen
Frankenthaler Foundation, this exhibition focuses on a brief but
critical period in Frankenthaler’s career during 1962–63.
Transitioning from the sparer, more graphic works of 1960–61,
Frankenthaler made paintings that more readily filled the space
of the canvas, moving toward what critic B.H. Friedman
described as the “total color image,” which would become
a hallmark of her later work.
980 Madison Avenue, New York September 11–October 18, 2014

2. Frankenthaler at work in her studio on East Eighty-Third Street and Third Avenue, New York, 1961, with Blue Form in a Scene (1961) and Swan Lake Series (1961)Helen Frankenthaler, Pink Lady, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 84 1 2 × 58 inches (214.6 × 147.3 cm)
LAUREN MAHONY This exhibition focuses
on a very brief, but significant period in
Frankenthaler’s career. Why focus on the
years 1962 and 1963? Where is Frankenthaler
in her career at this point?
ELIZABETH SMITH Helen Frankenthaler was at
a transitional time in her career during the
years 1962 and 1963, which is why I titled my
essay in the exhibition catalogue “Redefining
a Practice” (a phrase that was inspired by a
passage in a text on Frankenthaler by art his-
torian Anne Wagner). A major survey of her
work had taken place just two years before,
at the Jewish Museum—which was a venue
where many significant young artists’ work
was shown, including the first shows of Jasper
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the early
1960s—and this experience undoubtedly
prompted her to question and reconsider
aspects of her practice going forward.1
It is
important to remember that Frankenthaler
was still in her early thirties in 1962 and 1963;
while she had completed a substantial body of
work in the first decade of her career—includ-
ing the landmark painting Mountains and Sea
(1952)—she had not yet begun the work for
which she would become best known later in
the 1960s, when her reputation as one of the
leading artists of her generation would be
firmly established.
LM The title of the exhibition, Composing with
Color, indicates a move away from the more
linear compositions that immediately precede
this body of work. Can you describe how these
paintings differ? What do you think prompted
this shift? Were these fleeting explorations or
did they carry through her career?
ES During these years, Frankenthaler began
deepening her exploration of aspects of her
work begun in the late 1950s that would antici-
pate the developments of the mid- and later
sixties. She began to compose with larger areas
of color, increasingly considering it inseparable
from line and drawing, resulting in paintings
that were bolder, brighter, and more defined
in their compositions. She started to experi-
ment with the use of acrylic paint in 1962, and
went back and forth from oil to acrylic until
fully adopting the new medium in 1963. She
also investigated ways to compose differently
with color, making a group of paintings in
1963 that were “reversed”—with the back
of the painted canvases turned to the front
and further worked on—resulting in images
in which the entire surface was flooded with
areas of color, recalling the painting of Rothko.
This group of works, colloquially called the
“floorboard” pieces because of the visible
presence of striations from the wooden floor
of her studio on the surfaces, were made
mostly in oil paint, but in at least one case
incorporated acrylic and oil in a single work
(Gulf Stream, 1963). They led directly to a
group of subsequent works in 1964 that were
bolder, more assertive examples of composi-
tions structured around the entire surface
of the canvas, including Buddha’s Court and
Interior Landscape.
Frankenthaler’s earliest experiments in
all-acrylic paintings, such as Pink Lady and
Mountain Pool (both 1963), also anticipate the
mastery and fluidity in her use of the medium
apparent in one of her most majestic works of
the early 1960s, The Bay (1963), and in many
other important paintings of that decade.
Elizabeth Smith, art historian and executive director of
the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, in conversation
with Gagosian’s Lauren Mahony

3. Frankenthaler also distinguished herself
as one of the great colorists of late-twentieth-
century painting, utilizing color with an unsur-
passed boldness, and investigating the full
range of its possibilities over a long career.
Evident in the paintings of these two years
is the diversity of her approach to color. To
the question of color and at what point she
became conscious of being a “color painter,”
she replied: “Only when the world puts those
labels on it . . . I mixed funny shades of colors
and used them . . . because they made the
drawing in my picture move . . . I did not have
a vision or a notion about color per se being the
thing that would make me or my pictures work
or operate.”2
Later, she commented, “For me,
as a picture develops, color always comes out of
drawing. I never start only with color. I start
out as a space maker on a flat thing with four
corners . . . Color is also extremely important
to my ‘process.’ It’s born out of idea, mood,
luck, imagination, risk, into what might even
be ugly; then I let it tell me what might/should
be used next, until I get the light and order
that satisfies to perfection. The result is color
and space and, I hope, a beautiful message.”3
LM In your catalogue essay, you discuss these
paintings in the context of the early 1960s
and the direction of American art in that
moment, which you describe as a moment of
“extraordinary transformation.” Can you talk
a little about Frankenthaler’s place within, or
apart from, movements such as Color Field,
Pop, Neo-Dada, and Minimalism?
ES These changes and developments within
Frankenthaler’s painting took place at a pivotal
time in American art history. By 1962 Pop art
and a movement then known as Neo-Dada had
emerged; Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein,
Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and many oth-
ers were receiving increasing attention for the
way their work challenged and overturned the
conventions of Abstract Expressionist pain-
ting. Artists such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth
Kelly, and Donald Judd were increasingly
moving their work in more reductive direc-
tions, and those who were becoming known
as the Color Field painters—Morris Louis and
Kenneth Noland—were also developing bod-
ies of work that eschewed visible evidence of
gesture or painterly traces. Frankenthaler, who
was known as a second-generation Abstract
Expressionist, had inspired Louis and Noland
in the direction their work would take by their
exposure to her painting Mountains and Sea.
While later she would also be considered, at
times, a Color Field painter, and her work
shown in exhibitions that included theirs,
such as Post Painterly Abstraction (Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 1964), she never fit
easily into that movement.
Throughout her career, Frankenthaler
maintained an independent vision and one that
was often distinct from that of her contempo-
raries. Unlike them, for instance, she chose not
to make work in series (with few exceptions),
but considered each painting an individual
exploration, in which she freely returned to
motifs and ideas from earlier pictures and
embraced aspects of chance and “accident”
that suited the needs of the composition. The
presence of allusive qualities and visual ref-
erences to imagery from the known world, a
hallmark of her work throughout her career,
further distinguished her from many of her
contemporaries who purged such references
from their art. Also unusual was her evident
interest in art history and in the work of the
old masters as well as nineteenth- and earlier
twentieth-century precedents.
LM One painting in the exhibition, Hommage
à M.L. (1962), refers to an earlier twentieth-
century painter, Marie Laurencin. How does
it relate to the earlier painter’s work? Was it a
common practice of Frankenthaler’s to refer-
ence historical figures?
ES Marie Laurencin was one of the few well-
known female art-historical figures at the time
Frankenthaler made this work. Often during
her career she would reference the work of ear-
lier artists and paintings that inspired or had
an impact on her in some way. For instance,
her 1981 painting For E.M. is based on a
small still life painting by Édouard Manet in
the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Henri Matisse was a source of inspiration for
several paintings, as were artists ranging from
Titian to Carel Fabritius to Francisco Goya,
all of whom Frankenthaler acknowledged
directly in the titles to the works that she
made using the tonalities, compositions, and
figurative references in their paintings as a
point of departure for her own abstractions.
LM There have been several exhibitions of
Frankenthaler’s work in the last year and
a half, beginning with Gagosian Gallery’s
Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler
from 1950 to 1959 (2013), which introduced
this influential twentieth-century artist to a
new generation of art lovers. What do you
hope new audiences will take away from this
group of paintings?
ES From this exhibition I hope that viewers
will gain a new understanding of a little-known
chapter in Frankenthaler’s work—one that
was critically important in her passage from
the strongly gestural and painterly works of
the 1950s to the greater clarity and boldness
of her vocabulary in the 1960s.
Aspects of the way Frankenthaler experi-
mented and deftly yet searchingly honed her
approach to abstract painting are made newly
apparent by the paintings included in this
exhibition. Most striking, to my mind, is the
resonance of her work with that of much con-
temporary painting practice today. In terms
of its allusiveness, its taut yet syncopated
balance of seeming spontaneity and rigorous
control, its embrace of color, and its refusal
to be categorized—Frankenthaler’s paint-
ing suggests affinities with that of artists of a
younger generation. In this respect the work
of artists as diverse as Cecily Brown, Albert
Oehlen, Charline von Heyl, Laura Owens,
and Mary Weatherford comes to mind. As
poet Frank O’Hara, who curated her 1960
exhibition at the Jewish Museum, commented,
Frankenthaler’s work is “inclusive and gener-
ous, free-ranging, and enthusiastic.”4
These
qualities persisted throughout her work over
the decades. She once commented, “It isn’t
that I want to experiment with style. I often
want to experiment with the different ways
I know myself.”5
1. The Jewish Museum also presented the 1957 show Artists
of the New York School: Second Generation, in which
Frankenthaler’s work was included.
2. “Oral history interview with Helen Frankenthaler,”
conducted by Barbara Rose, August 1968, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
3. Helen Frankenthaler quoted in Karen Wilkin,
Frankenthaler: Works on Paper 1949–1984 (New York:
George Braziller, 1984), p. 69.
4. Frank O’Hara, “Helen Frankenthaler,” in Helen
Frankenthaler Paintings (New York: The Jewish
Museum, 1960), p. 5.
5. Frankenthaler, in Rose, “Oral history interview with Helen
Frankenthaler,” 1968.
Color is. . . born out of idea, mood, luck, imagination,
risk, into what might even be ugly; then I let it tell me what
might/should be used next, until I get the light and order
that satisfies to perfection.
Helen Frankenthaler, 1983–84
Helen Frankenthaler, Gulf Stream, 1963, oil and acrylic on canvas, 86 × 65 inches (218.4 × 165.1 cm)40