Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules

Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon
Texts Douglas Dreishpoon

Introduzione

Palazzo Strozzi celebrates Helen Frankenthaler, one of the most revolutionary artists of the twentieth century, in a major exhibition that surveys her life’s work in dialogue with selected works by her contemporaries—Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Anthony Caro, and Anne Truitt—highlighting friendships, affinities, and influences.

Pivotal in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) challenged conventions of painting in search of her own expressive language. Frankenthaler explored new relationships between color, space, and form, expanding the possibilities of abstract painting in ways that enhance the history of art and continue to inspire younger artists.

Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules, organized with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York, offers a unique journey through large canvases, as well as sculptures and works on paper, creating the most comprehensive exhibition ever dedicated to the artist in Italy. The exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in a universe of poetic abstraction, deft technique, and unrestrained imagination. In a world bound by rules, Frankenthaler teaches us that artistic freedom is the essence of creativity.

My rule is no rules, and if you have a real sense of limits, then you are free to break out of them.
Helen Frankenthaler

Biography

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) was a pivotal figure in postwar American art, renowned for her contribution to the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Her innovative “soak-stain” technique, in which she poured thinned paint onto raw, unprimed canvas, led to the creation of translucent color fields, exemplified by her seminal work Mountains and Sea (1952). This technique had a profound influence on artists such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.

Born in New York City, Frankenthaler attended the Dalton School, where she studied art with Rufino Tamayo, and with Paul Feeley, later at Bennington College. Her exhibition career began in 1950, and in 1951 she had her first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, also participated in the landmark 9th St. Exhibition. From 1959 onward, Frankenthaler regularly participated in major international exhibitions, winning first prize at the Première Biennale de Paris and representing the United States at the 1966 Venice Biennale.

Throughout her six-decade career, Frankenthaler explored a wide range of media, including ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and printmaking. Frankenthaler’s artistic legacy continues to exert a strong influence on contemporary art, solidifying her status as a central figure in the art of the twentieth century

Gallery 1

The exhibition opens with four works from the 1970s, a period when Helen Frankenthaler was perfecting her soak-stain technique, developed in 1952. A painting like Moveable Blue showcases the artist in peak form: pouring, painting, and drawing with absolute confidence. The lessons she learned from Jackson Pollock in the early 1950s—that it was possible to paint using various materials and tools while circling a large canvas spread out on the floor—inspired another type of abstract painting with expansive fields of color, known as Color Field painting. Fiesta and Untitled show how similar ideas explored in a smaller format share the same tonal atmosphere, spatial complexity, and linear articulation as Moveable Blue. Other works in this exhibition present the achievements the artist reached during this decade.

Matisse Table is one of the ten sculptures Frankenthaler created in the London studio of her friend Anthony Caro in 1972. Frankenthaler had a deep appreciation for sculpture and sculptors, especially Caro, David Smith, and Anne Truitt, whose works she owned and kept close by. Many of the sculptures created during Frankenthaler’s two-week stay in Caro’s studio pay homage to Smith, who early on had encouraged her to create three-dimensional works. It is not only the materials used, some of which came from Smith’s studio, that honor him, but also the way they were cut, welded, and composed. Frankenthaler approached sculpture with the same intuitive impulses she channeled to paint. Matisse Table, with its tilted surface, fan-like shapes, and still life elements, refers to Henri Matisse’s painting Pineapple (1948), transforming the original model into something new.

Helen Frankenthaler
New York, 1928 – Darien, Connecticut, 2011
Moveable Blue
1973
acrylic on canvas; 177.8 × 617.2 cm
ASOM Collection, inv. E 809

Helen Frankenthaler
Matisse Table
1972
steel; 209.6 × 134.6 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

“I made this in London when I worked at the sculptor Anthony Caro’s studio one summer [in 1972] and made ten metal sculptures . . . a few years later, he came to my studio in New York and painted.”
—Palm Springs lecture transcript, 1996.

“I had been staring at a Matisse [painting] called Pineapple from ’48 [reproduced on a large poster in Caro’s studio] . . ., and thought, could that in any way be translated into a sculpture?”
—AIC lecture transcript, 1991.

Helen Frankenthaler
Untitled
1973
acrylic on canvas; 51.4 × 85.7 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Helen Frankenthaler
Fiesta
1973
acrylic on paper; cm 56.5 × 76.8
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Gallery 2

Frankenthaler was living a bohemian life in downtown New York City when she saw Jackson Pollock’s Number 14 in a solo exhibition of his black-and-white paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The work had a profound impact on the young painter who, while visiting Pollock on Long Island, saw his rustic studio barn and witnessed his painting process. Pollock maneuvered around monumental canvases rolled on the studio floor. As abstract as Number 14 appears, tell-tale images emerge. The suggestion of subliminal imagery intrigued Frankenthaler, who responded to Pollock’s radical methods: the choreography of an improvised full-bodied gesture—“ropey skeins of enamel, webbing, working from the shoulder not the wrist”—and the possibility that abstract painting could have some kind of “message.”

Abstraction, born from spontaneous drawing, allowed Frankenthaler to express her imagination with pictorial signs, symbols, and evocative “scenes” without fully revealing herself. Ambiguity is essential for her images to remain mysterious—like poems—to mean different things to different people. Pollock enabled her to see painting as an intuitive process primed by drawing: an approach without limits that inspired Frankenthaler’s masterpiece, Mountains and Sea, as well as many of the paintings in this exhibition, including those in this room, which indicate a precocious artist of prodigious talent.

Jackson Pollock
Cody, Wyoming, 1912 – Springs, New York, 1956
Number 14
1951
oil on canvas; 146.5 × 269.5 cm
London, Tate. Purchased with assistance from the American Fellows of the Tate Gallery Foundation, 1988

“[Pollock’s Number 14] was more than just the drawing, webbing, weaving, dripping of a stick held in enamel, more than just the rhythm. It seemed to have much more complication and order of a kind that at the time I responded to. Something . . . more baroque, more drawn and with some elements of realism abstracted or Surrealism or a hint of it . . . It is a totally abstract picture, but it had that additional quality . . . for me.”
—Interview by Barbara Rose, 1968

Helen Frankenthaler
Open Wall
1953
oil on canvas; 136.5 × 332.7 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

“[The painting began as] an experiment to create some kind of sense of space and boundary. . . In the end, a spine of the painting, what makes one respond, has very little to do with the subject matter per se but rather the interplay of spaces and juxtapositions of forms.”
—Interview by Julia Brown, After Mountains and Sea exh. cat., 1998.

Helen Frankenthaler
Western Dream
1957
oil on canvas; 177.8 × 218.4 cm
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, 2023 (2023.560)

Helen Frankenthaler
Mediterranean Thoughts
1960
oil on sized, primed canvas; 256.5 x 237.5 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Gallery 3

To see a painted steel sculpture by David Smith and a painted wood column by Anne Truitt, both from the 1960s, in the same room as four Frankenthaler canvases from the same period, is to appreciate why Frankenthaler developed close friendships with both sculptors. If the weightless clouds in Tutti-Frutti pulse with buoyant abandon, the rectilinear banners in The Human Edge descend monolithically.

Frankenthaler and Smith shared a common belief when it came to making art: No rules! It didn’t matter whether you were a painter or a sculptor (or both), the message was the same: no rules meant never being complacent about how your art got made, what materials were used, or what the results might look like. Being open to surprise, even if it meant failing, was part of the creative process. So was constantly pressing against the limits of what had already been done to express yourself anew. Smith’s Untitled (Zig VI), constructed out of heavy girder beams stacked, welded, and coasting on miniature wheels, like a child’s monumental toy, is joyful. Truitt’s Seed gains personality through its painted surfaces.

Frankenthaler and Truitt shared close friends, life experiences, and a mutual commitment to painting, something that Truitt—like Smith—did independently and in tandem with her sculpture.

Helen Frankenthaler
Alassio
1960
oil on linen; 216.5 × 332.7 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Helen Frankenthaler
Cape (Provincetown)
1964
acrylic on canvas; 278.5 x 237.2 cm
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria. Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1967, inv. 1773-5

David Smith
Decatur, Indiana, 1906 – South Shaftsbury, Vermont, 1965
Untitled (Zig VI)
1964
steel, paint; 200.3 × 112.7 × 73.7 cm
New York, The Estate of David Smith

Helen Frankenthaler
Tutti-Frutti
1966
acrylic on canvas; 296.6 × 175.3 cm
Buffalo, New York, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr. 1976, K1976:8

Helen Frankenthaler
The Human Edge
1967
acrylic on canvas; 315× 236.9 cm
Syracuse, New York, Everson Museum of Art, Museum purchase to honor Director, Max Sullivan on the opening of the IM Pei building, 68.23

“[The Human Edge] was painted around the time of the debut of severe minimalist painting. At the bottom edge, it’s a very personal, worried, non-geometric, non-clean line—L-shaped. When it came time to title [the painting] . . . I [knew that I] would call it The Human Edge because there was a lot about Minimalism that removed the human quality—the human edge.”
—Palm Springs lecture transcript, 1996.

Anne Truitt
Anne Dean; Baltimore, Maryland 1921 – Washington, D.C., 2004
Seed
1969
acrylic on wood; 217.2 × 45.7 × 45.7 cm
Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art. Gift of Katharine Graham, Washington, D.C., BMA 1995.121

Gallery 4

The works by other artists displayed in this gallery, and in the two smaller adjacent rooms, provide a deeper understanding of Frankenthaler’s artistic circle. Some works came to Frankenthaler as gifts, tokens of friendship. Others were purchased by the artist. Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis saw Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea at her studio six months after it was painted. Compared to Pollock’s dense abstractions, Frankenthaler’s lightly stained canvas, full of light and space, offered an alternative approach that set American art on a new course.

Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell were married for thirteen years (1958–71). During this time, they shared family and friends, spent summers on Cape Cod and in Europe, and exchanged artistic ideas. Separated in age by fourteen years and temperamentally different (Frankenthaler extroverted, gregarious, and impish; Motherwell inherently shy, bookish, and introverted), both lived to paint. Motherwell’s Summertime in Italy and Frankenthaler’s Alassio (in previous gallery) allude to the summer of 1960, when the couple rented a villa in that seaside town. Inspired by each other’s company, the sun and the surf, both paintings radiate joie de vivre.

Mark and Mell Rothko were also part of the couple’s artistic circle. What Pollock was to Frankenthaler in the 1950s, Rothko was in the early 1960s: the catalyst for another kind of abstract image. Frankenthaler’s Cape (Provincetown), in the previous gallery, has a distinct affinity to the Rothko in this gallery. Both artists render geometric form in ways that elevate its human qualities.

Mark Rothko
Marcus Rothkowitz; Dvinsk, Russia, 1903 – New York, 1970
Untitled
1949
oil and mixed media on canvas; 228.9 × 112 cm
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. Gift of the Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 1986.43.158

Robert Motherwell
Aberdeen, Washington, 1915 – Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1991
Summertime in Italy
1960
oil and graphite on paper; 148.4 × 107.9 cm
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. The Nancy Lee and Perry Bass Fund, 1999.55.4

Morris Louis
Baltimore, Maryland, 1912 – Washington, D.C., 1962
Aleph Series V
1960
Magna on canvas; 266.7 × 206.1 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Kenneth Noland
Asheville, North Carolina, 1924 – Port Clyde, Maine, 2010
Helen’s Choice (La scelta di Helen)
1977
acrylic and graphite on canvas; 239.1 × 174 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Gallery 5

In the early 1950s, Frankenthaler made the first of many visits to David Smith’s home and studio in the Adirondack mountains near Lake George, a 352-kilometer drive north of New York City. Bolton Landing was like another world, one where clouds hung off totemic steel sculptures spread across open fields. Inside Smith’s cinderblock studio, one would sense a space full of potential, a creative struggle with heavy metals cast and welded.

The sculpture featured in this room is a personage—prehistoric, gladiatorial, threatening. Portrait of the Eagle’s Keeper was one of Frankenthaler’s earliest art acquisitions, something she kept close by always. As she moved, the sculpture moved with her, eventually occupying a prominent place in the Upper East Side townhouse she shared with Robert Motherwell. There, it joined Mountains and Sea, Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70 (1961), Rothko’s Untitled (1949, a gift to Motherwell), and other cherished works by contemporaries and old masters.

David Smith
Portrait of the Eagle’s Keeper
1948-1949
steel, bronze; 96.5 x 32.7 × 57.8 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Gallery 6

Frankenthaler met David Smith through the American critic Clement Greenberg. After she married Robert Motherwell in 1958, Smith became a beloved member of the family. All three artists, frequently joined by their young children, spent time together in New York City, at Bolton Landing, and on Cape Cod during the summer months. Smith’s untimely death in the spring of 1965 was a profound loss.

The smaller works in this gallery, all gifts to Frankenthaler, are a tribute to love and friendship. Smith’s Untitled tabletop sculpture is a rumble-tumble free-for-all animated by the same orgiastic energy seen in Frankenthaler’s Tutti-Frutti. Two untitled works on paper, among the hundreds of figurative brush drawings that Smith made during the 1950s, attest to a sculptural imagination free of rules.

Motherwell made Helen’s Collage a year before he and Frankenthaler were married. At Five in the Afternoon, Motherwell’s first “Elegy” painting, is titled after Federico García Lorca’s poem about the death of a bullfighter. Black on White No. 4, a single geometric figure suspended in space, signals the painter’s transition to related figures, open and closed.

Robert Motherwell
At Five in the Afternoon
1948-1949
casein and graphite on paperboard; 38.1 × 50.8 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

David Smith
Untitled
1951
ink on paper; 25.4 × 20.3 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

David Smith
Untitled
1957
enamel and oil on paper; 58.4 × 63.5 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Robert Motherwell
Helen’s Collage
1957
oil, pasted papers, and charcoal on paperboard; 74.9 × 49.5 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

David Smith
Untitled
1961
bronze; 14 × 29.2 × 12.7 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Robert Motherwell
Black on White No. 4
1968
acrylic and graphite on paper; 15.2 × 20.3 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Gallery 7

During the early 1970s, following her divorce from Motherwell, Frankenthaler reinvented herself. Summers became a time for extensive travel—to Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, and England. She leased a waterfront home with a studio in Stamford, Connecticut, and spent more time outside of New York City. Eventually, she purchased a home nearby on Shippan Point and built a new studio there. Some of the paintings from this period reflect this serene setting. Others portend another side of the painter’s personality—liberated, tough, provocative.

From her living room, Frankenthaler had a clear view of Long Island Sound. Being near the water, as she had been for many summers in Provincetown with Motherwell, was comforting. Seascapes joined landscapes as the basis for new abstract paintings—tonal and atmospheric. As monochromatically uniform as Ocean Drive West #1 appears, awash in cerulean blue, thin passages of white offset by prismatic lines activate the surface.

A series of “strip” paintings from the mid-1970s evoke the vertical assent of an urban setting. The directional white bands that bookend Plexus open the surface like vents. These also compress the painting’s center—clouds of delicately sponged and brushed color. Frankenthaler’s strips hum with the same erratic energy as the banners in The Human Edge.

Mornings is one of a flurry of images resembling geologic formations or somatic cavities. Strokes of black and red marker, like errant jabs, dart across oceanic white foam.

Helen Frankenthaler
Mornings
1971
acrylic and marker on canvas; 294.6 × 185.4 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Helen Frankenthaler
Heart of London Map
1972
steel; 221× 63.5 × 209.6 cm
The Levett Collection

Helen Frankenthaler
Ocean Drive West #1
1974
acrylic on canvas; 238.8 × 365.8 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

“[The painting] was done there [at Frankenthaler’s studio on Ocean Drive West, Shippan Point, Stamford, Connecticut] . . .On Ocean Drive West you are always staring at horizon lines… There are hazed-out parts of Long Island across the Sound, parts of it can be visible, [other] parts not. I wasn’t looking at nature or seascape but at the drawing within nature—just as the sun or moon might be about circles or light and dark.”
—HF in Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective, 1989.

Helen Frankenthaler
Plexus
1976
acrylic on canvas; 289.6 x 228.6 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Gallery 8

Entering middle age is a rite of passage for anyone. For Frankenthaler crossing the midlife threshold meant confronting new realities. She knew that maintaining a presence in New York to see others’ art and to conduct business was important. She also knew that spending more time away from the city, close to the water, was not only calming but essential. It was a question of balance. She found ways to have both, painting all the while.

Frankenthaler’s respect for the history of art, nurtured early on in Paul Feeley’s classes at Bennington College, never ceased. From Paleolithic caves to Monet’s water lilies, she drew from art of the ages, and during the late 1970s and 1980s, found renewed inspiration in paintings by Titian, Velásquez, Manet, and Rembrandt. Scrutinizing abstract details in old master paintings enabled Frankenthaler to cross a technical threshold into a tonal world of diaphanous veils, tinted grounds, subtle washes, and transparencies. She discovered another kind of space and light and brought these to bear in works like Eastern Light, Cathedral, Madrid, and Star Gazing.

Anthony Caro entered Frankenthaler’s social arena in 1959, on his first trip to New York, and from then on remained one of her closest friends. It is a fitting tribute to see Caro’s Ascending the Stairs in the same gallery as Frankenthaler’s Yard. Caro’s sculpture, completed after he and Frankenthaler attended a David Smith symposium at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., evolved piece by piece, weld by weld, in much the same way that Frankenthaler’s Yard did. Both shared with Smith an empirical approach that played out in real time.

Helen Frankenthaler
Yard
1972
steel; 109.2 × 68.6 × 96.5 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Anthony Caro
New Malden, UK, 1924 – London, 2013
Ascending the Stairs
1979-1983
steel, sheet, varnish; 111.8 × 83.8 × 101.6 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Helen Frankenthaler
Eastern Light
1982
acrylic on canvas; 175.3 × 301 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

“When I’m in Connecticut [Shippan Point, Stamford], I often go out on the deck and watch the constantly changing skies and tides, and what happens to colors and shapes and spaces. And somehow this [seeps] into my aesthetic.”
—Joanna Shaw-Eagle, Architectural Digest Visits: Helen Frankenthaler, 1985.

Helen Frankenthaler
Cathedral
1982
acrylic on canvas; 179.4 × 304.8 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

“I started using [thick] paint in what I call “clumps” . . .as drawing itself in certain portions of a tinted canvas, treating the rest of it as if it were watercolor on paper, which is something I’ve done all my life. I think [that] bearing down on something because it is canvas and big and serious often gets in your way. [Better] to treat things as if they were important but dispensable.”
—Pollock-Krasner lecture transcript, 1994.

Helen Frankenthaler
Madrid
1984
acrylic on canvas; 162.2 × 295.9 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

“I have always responded to the wonders of the natural environment. When I was a child, I used to take my mother to the window of my room in our apartment on the thirteenth floor in Manhattan, and have her look at clouds, because I was so mesmerized by what I could see out the windows, all the spaces and changes of nature.”
—HF interview with Tim Marlow, May 2000, Connecticut.

Helen Frankenthaler
Star Gazing
1989
acrylic on canvas; 181.6 × 365.8 cm
New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

“I always feel. . . I retain my origins [in] Cubism. And whenever I’m stuck. . . I feel, well, go back to the familiar . . . to a road you’ve traveled and something new will happen from there. That’s usually my way out. I see signs of it here in something like [those] rectangles.”
—Q&A with Andrew Forge, Yale Art Gallery transcript, 1993.

Gallery 9

By the 1990s Frankenthaler painted in two ways. One might coalesce all at once in a single session, with only minor additions—the breakthrough initiated decades earlier by Mountains and Sea. The other mode—what she called the “redeemed picture”—bore a more “worked-into or scrubbed surface, often darker, more dense.” The desired result, regardless of approach, was, a “beautiful picture” that looked like it had been “born at once, regardless of how many hours, or weeks, or years it took to make it.”

Frankenthaler never questioned why she painted or for whom. Expressing herself through art was something she had done since childhood. Making art channeled her emotional energy and kept her focused and stable.

Janus and Yin Yang commune like brother and sister. Sites for the confluence of opposites, both paintings share tinted grounds, layered surfaces, and transparent vectors. Some passages, rimmed with trails of fire or splattered with a spew of black dots, feel like thresholds to other galaxies, not unlike Star Gazing (in the previous gallery).

The Rake’s Progress and Fantasy Garden display a dense physicality, because the painter was experimenting with gel medium mixed with acrylic and manipulated with rakes, masonry trowels, spatulas, sponges, and wooden spoons. The energized surfaces of Borrowed Dream and Maelstrom (both in the next Gallery)—tough, edgy, recal