This exhibition catalogue offers an in-depth look at a brief but critical period in Helen Frankenthaler's career, the years 1962 and 1963, when she "composed with color" rather than with line, resulting in the freer compositions that would become the hallmark of her long and prolific career. These years are notable not only for her development of a personal vocabulary of abstraction, but also for her early experiments with acrylic, rather than oil, paint. The marked new direction of her painting is evident in these vivid canvases, presented beautifully as full-page plates.
This striking new book features 18 paintings by the renowned American abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler. Showcasing eighteen of Frankenthaler’s paintings, dating from 1962 to 1987, this beautiful book highlights the diverse relationship between drawing and painting evident in the artist’s work. The book includes color plates of all 18 works, as well as nine double-page spread details. Never-before-published documentary material appears throughout new and insightful texts by John Elderfield, Francine Prose, and Carol Armstrong. This book accompanies the 2016 exhibition of Frankenthaler’s work at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills.
A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York “The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.” ―Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew―and left her mark on―the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions. Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments--from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg―comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world. Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.
This lavishly illustrated book offers a detailed look at the evolution of Helen Frankenthaler's sumptuous evocations of the natural world in paintings spanning forty years. Famous as the inventor of the "soak-stain" technique that ushered in Color Field painting in the mid-twentieth century, Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) continued to create powerful, original abstractions throughout her lifetime. This volume focuses on a selection of paintings that reveal the relationship between the pittura and the panorama in her work over the course of four decades. As Frankenthaler scholar John Elderfield notes, this interplay between works that are reminiscent of easel paintings, though made on the floor, and large, horizontal canvases that open onto shallow but expansive spaces, as panoramas do, was intrinsic to the artist's development. In an original essay, Pepe Karmel traces connections between Frankenthaler's sumptuous evocations of what she called "the atmosphere of landscape" and inspirations ranging from sixteenth-century Venetian paintings to works by Lucio Fontana, as well as her influence on successors including Mary Weatherford. Published to accompany an exhibition organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and Venetian Heritage, in association with Gagosian, at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, this generously illustrated volume offers a close look at a key aspect of Frankenthaler's long pursuit of painting as a means to convey experiences and effects.
Like music, art is a universal language. Although looking at works of art is a pleasurable enough experience, to appreciate them fully requires certain skills and knowledge." --Carol Strickland, from the introduction to The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern * This heavily illustrated crash course in art history is revised and updated. This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media. * Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible-even at a cursory reading. * From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.
