HELEN FRANKENTHALER b. 1928
Viewpoint II, 1979
Acrylic on canvas, 81 1/4 X 94 1/2" (206.38 X 240.03 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Gift of Paul and Suzanne Donnelly Jenkins, 989-0-108

Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City. She received her formal education at Bennington College and continued additional art studies in the studios of Ruffino Tamayo, Wallace Harrison, and Hans Hofmann.
Two major aspects of Frankenthaler's work are her contribution to modernism and her allusion to naturalism. Most obvious is her contribution to modernism. In the early 1950s she developed a painting technique of wedding paint to the weave of canvas to form a single saturated matrix. Through these experiments, she, along with artists such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, enabled the Minimalists of the next generation to reach the pinnacle of reductionism.
However, just as important as her contribution to modernism through her investigations into stain painting are Frankenthaler's allusions to naturalism. In Viewpoint II, painted almost thirty years after her breakthroughs in abstraction, there is an indication or suggestion of landscape; a beach and sky represented through the horizontal division of the picture Plane, the warm arrays and the saturated atmosphere. The stained surface, with thicker overpainting, also anticipates figuration.
From a distance, the space within Viewpoint II moves in and out: it breathes. It is laden with representational history, sometimes suggesting the modernist works of watercolorist John Marin and, at other times, emitting a transcendental light akin to the nineteenth-century luminists.
Looking closely at Viewpoint II, the viewer can experience the arabesque of Frankenthaler's markmaking, which appears considered or planned and, at the same time, accidental. It is the lyricism of a conscious stroke moving across the surface that intensifies the more moody temporal grays and warm muted reds of the stained canvas.
The results of these seemingly contradictory impulses of abstraction and representation in Viewpoint II are complex. The viewer can sense, on one hand, the control that a traditional easel painter has and, on the other, the gestural freedom that an expressionist possesses. What comes through in the end, however, is essence over matter.

ROBERT GODFREY