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Helen Frankenthaler
Mountains and Sea and the years after 1956-1959
October 15, 1998 - January 31, 1999
After its recent Katharina Sieverding exhibition the Deutsche Guggenheim presents another major artist of the 20th century with the exhibition "After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959," running from October 15, 1998, through January 31, 1999. It is Frankenthaler's first solo exhibition in a museum in Germany.
The exhibition focuses on the early years of the artist's career, with thirteen paintings from the 1950s, which helped establish Frankenthaler as one of the most important and influential artists of the second generation of Abstract Expressionism.
The painting which introduces the exhibition is the legendary Mountains and Sea, a work which Frankenthaler created in 1952 at the age of 23. Mountains and Sea reveals a debt to Frankenthaler's earlier influences, including Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, and Arshile Gorky. However, its use of unprimed canvas and the artist's union of figure and ground were triggered by an encounter with Jackson Pollock's black-and-white paintings at an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York in 1951. Pollock's rejection of the conventional brush and easel encouraged Frankenthaler's more liberated approach to the canvas. Pouring thinned-down paint directly onto bare canvas that absorbed the pigment into its fibers, the artist created breathing landscapes of transparent planes of color washes.
Frankenthaler, who insists she is not an Action painter, makes the fluidity of the paint as it seeps into and through the canvas - not the gesture of the painter, as in Pollock's drips - primary to the animation of her work. After a short period in the early mid-50s creating more densely composed paintings, the artist returned to the style she had discovered in Mountains and Sea.
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Paintings such as Eden (1956) and Before the Caves (1958) - both in the exhibition - show Frankenthaler's tendency to make generous use of bare canvas, giving the light-filled negative spaces in her work equal pictorial weight with the painted areas. This tension Frankenthaler creates in her paintings between negative and positive space echoes the play developed between flatness and depth as well as pure abstraction and hints of recognizable imagery.
Frankenthaler's unique work influenced her contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists. Both Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis have cited their introduction to Frankenthaler's work as a catalyst to the formation of their mature style.
Helen Frankenthaler's first significant appearance in Germany was her participation at the Documenta II in Kassel in 1959. Her paintings Mountains and Sea, Las Mayas, and Nude were presented in that exhibition. Two of these paintings are now again on view in Berlin.
The accompanying catalog is the first extensive publication about the artist in German. In addition to an interview with Helen Frankenthaler by Julia Brown, the catalog contains essays by Julia Brown and Susan Cross and includes numerous illustrations (including 13 color plates.) The catalog is available at the MuseumsShop in a German or English hard-cover version for DM 49,--.
Press-Preview: Wednesday, October 14, 1998, 3 - 5 p.m.
Images of the exhibition
are available online at www.photo-files.de/guggenheim in a 300 dpi quality.
Further information at
Manager: Svenja Gräfin von Reichenbach
Press: Sara Bernshausen
Phone: +49-30-202093-14
Fax: +49-30-202093-20
email: berlin.guggenheim@db.com
Internet: www.deutsche-guggenheim.de
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