With a complex and intense exhibition path never realized before in Italy, the revolutionary painting of Helen Frankenthaler arrives at Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence. “Painting without rules” is the title of this great exhibition that celebrates one of the most important artists of the twentieth century with the display of works – created from 1953 to 2002 – in dialogue with paintings and sculptures of other artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Anthony Caro and Anne Truitt. The painter, born in New York in 1928, was influenced, in the early 1950s by the exponents of the New York School and by other key figures of post-war American art: a plurality of comparisons in the perspective of a continuous artistic mix as a precious resource for her research.
“Helen Frankenthaler. Dipingere senza regole”, installation view at Palazzo Strozzi, 2024, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
The exhibition chronologically traces the development of her pictorial practice, dedicating each room to a decade of her production and bringing out the fervor of comparisons, experimentations and dialogues with artists – contemporaries of her – that nourished her research. The exhibition, organized by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, is curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné, and aims to celebrate her innovative pictorial practice through the elective affinities that have marked her copious production. All the paintings come from famous international museums and collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the ASOM Collection and the Levett Collection – as well as from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York – and are exhibited in one of the most complete narratives ever created. «With her innovative research, Frankenthaler has distinguished herself as a pioneering figure in the field of abstract painting, expanding its potential in a way that continues to inspire new generations of artists today» said Arturo Galansino, president of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.
“Helen Frankenthaler. Dipingere senza regole”, installation view at Palazzo Strozzi, 2024, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
In fact, her research was instrumental in the innovative soak-stain technique with which she revolutionized contemporary painting in the rhythmic composition of form, color and space. The process, consisting of applying diluted paint spread horizontally on untreated canvases, generates effects similar to those of watercolor even with oil colors. The artist used brushes, sponges or directly buckets so that the color could expand and mix naturally, with nuanced and translucent chromatic superimpositions: an intuitive impulse that left no room for any rules, expanding the dimension of painting. Frankenthaler diluted oil colors with turpentine or other solvents to obtain a fluid and transparent consistency. The decision to use only acrylic colors dates back to 1962, experimenting with everything to apply them: brushes, sponges, cans, buckets, rags, sticks, rakes, cloths, as well as hands and fingers when she wanted to have more direct control.
“Helen Frankenthaler. Dipingere senza regole”, installation view at Palazzo Strozzi, 2024, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
Her skill consisted in this continuous oscillation between control and improvisation, in the intuitive ability to mix, to guide the amalgamation of colors waiting for it to become a pure combination of shapes, balanced between poetic abstraction and weightless imaginative visions. In a short video with archive images and interviews, we learn that the artist wanted to make her paintings work «in terms of surface, but also depth» to play with ambiguity and create «part of the magical je ne sais quoi that makes any painting work and conveys a message». Furthermore, these words of her echo throughout the exhibition: «I believe in tradition. In my case, my education – my roots – was based on Cézanne, Picasso’s Analytical Cubism and Braque, Kandinsky, Miró, Gorky, Pollock and many of their contemporaries, mentors and friends. I learned to appreciate the masters from the past, the Quattrocento, the Renaissance, along with the work of my contemporaries».
“Helen Frankenthaler. Dipingere senza regole”, installation view at Palazzo Strozzi, 2024, photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
Her painting, therefore, is also an interpretation of the analysis of abstract details of the works of the great masters, from which between the end of the Seventies and the Eighties she developed a more nuanced perception of light. This acquisition, a consequence of the study of the art history (an essential premise for her), gave her the technical inspiration to create greater transparencies, delicate nuances, at the origin of works such as “Eastern Light”, “Cathedral”, “Madrid” and “Star Gazing”. All her research is a tribute to color and its multifaceted declinations. Her pictorial vision remains an evocative rhythmic composition, almost a symbolic pentagram of chromium-plating in spots, in elongated or tonal stains, of sounds and timbres only announced: pure allusive presence without any narrative trace. The exhibition is completed by a schedule of educational projects and workshops in which children and their families are invited to approach abstract painting through Helen Frankenthaler’s fantastic clouds and stains, an opportunity for art history to become an imaginative narrative without rules aimed at everyone.
Nilla Zaira D’Urso
Info:
Helen Frankenthaler. Dipingere senza regole
27/09/2024 – 26/01/2025
Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza degli Strozzi, Firenze
www.palazzostorzi.org
Through art she feels the need to get closer to nature, deciding to create an artistic residence on Etna as a “refuge for contemporary art” for artists and scholars. Thus was born Nake artistic residence. She won the Responsible Etna Award 2015. In 2017, she was invited to the Sala Zuccari, Senate of the Republic, as an art critic. She writes for Italian and foreign artists. Curator of the first Museum of Contemporary Art of Etna and of the “Contemporary Etna” project.
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