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Hear about Helen Frankenthaler’s innovative “soak-stain” painting technique.
Transcript:
Megan Fontanella: Hello, my name is Megan Fontanella, and I’m Curator of Modern Art and Provenance here at the Guggenheim Museum.
Helen Frankenthaler is the jumping-off point for this exhibition, The Fullness of Color, because she is among those artists that very early on in the 1950s did start thinking about different ways of using color and moving away from gesture, so closely associated with Abstract Expressionism, a movement with which she was associated early in her career.
She was quite pioneering in the ’50s, ’60s, and onward. She was emphasizing the flatness of the picture plane and engaging with modernist painting techniques in a way that did turn it on its head.
In "Canal", from 1963, we’re seeing Frankenthaler’s more mature method of the “soak-stain” technique that she developed a decade prior. With this technique, Frankenthaler was using paint that was thinned out so that she could create puddles on the surface that would dye the fabric of the canvas. There’s an immediacy to the way the canvas fibers and the paint are becoming one. Large areas of color were allowed to flow together.
Sometimes she was working on the floor. The story goes that it was Jackson Pollock’s black-and-white ink drawings from ’51 that really got her thinking about what she could do with paint.
And she was often working with unprimed canvas. This is canvas that has not had a ground layer applied to it—it’s just the raw canvas. And she’s pouring color, soaking, creating puddles on the surface, and seeing the ways in which the color bleeds into its neighboring color, producing stains or blots that are reminiscent of those Pollock ink drawings. She would begin in the 1960s to start using acrylic paint, as opposed to oil paint, with this idea that she could achieve much richer colors. And "Canal" represents a shift to the more flattened, flowing forms, which you could create out of acrylic paint.
In a 1977 interview, Frankenthaler says she was committed to “ambiguous space that’s both smack on the surface and yet travels miles into space.” And with her work, she's resisting this idea of decoration but producing something that’s so much more than you might see at first glance.
Helen Frankenthaler was raised on the Upper East Side here in Manhattan, not far from the Guggenheim, and she maintained a studio here in New York. So she was very much in tune with all of this very rich avant-garde activity occurring here in the city.
Helen Frankenthaler, "Canal", 1963. Acrylic on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, in Washington, D.C., a federal agency; matching funds contributed by Evelyn Sharp 76.2225
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