Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler: Drawing within Nature documents an exhibition of Frankenthaler’s sumptuous paintings from the early to mid-1990s, many shown in New York for the first time.

This catalog documents an exhibition that focuses on Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings on canvas of the early 1990s, along with three large-scale paintings on paper from 1995. In this period, Frankenthaler experimented with new mediums and techniques, resulting in thickly impastoed surfaces that recalibrate our understanding of her practice. A new essay by Thomas Crow examines these paintings in the context of the varied environments in which Frankenthaler lived and worked, from the warm-toned terrain of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to her seaside home and studio in Stamford, Connecticut.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, while at times referencing figuration and landscape in highly personal ways.