Helen Frankenthaler, noted abstract painter, dies at 83
Helen Frankenthaler, an influential abstract painter whose quietly eloquent canvases of the 1950s inspired the Washington Color School of painting, died Dec. 27 at her home in Darien, Conn. She was 83.
Her family released a statement about her death but did not provide an exact cause.
Ms. Frankenthaler was best known for developing an innovative technique in which she poured diluted paint directly on the canvas, creating washes of color that flowed with the illusion of movement and depth.
Called "stain painting" or "soak stain," her method helped push the bold, aggressive abstract expressionist art of the 1940s toward a new level of subtlety and beauty.
Ms. Frankenthaler was only 23 when she painted "Mountains and Sea," a landmark work in the history of modern art. In the early 1950s, she had visited the studio of Jackson Pollock, the leading abstract expressionist, and had come away mesmerized by the way he dripped paint onto canvases lying on the floor.
"It was original, and it was beautiful," she told the New York Times magazine in 1989, "and it was new, and it was saying the most that could be said in painting up to that point - and it really drew me in."
Emulating Pollock's style, Ms. Frankenthaler set a large canvas, 7 by 10 feet, on the floor of her New York studio one day in 1952. She deliberately left it untreated, without a preliminary coat of priming.
Thinning her oil paint to a watery consistency with turpentine, she poured shades of blue, pink, green and gold onto the canvas from coffee cans. The paint soaked into the woven fabric like a wine stain spreading into a tablecloth.
She had not sketched any patterns or images, but as Ms. Frankenthaler stood back from the painting, it reminded her of the rocky coast of Nova Scotia, which she had recently visited. She called the painting "Mountains and Sea."
"Because her method is intuitive, her pictures flirt with failure," Washington Post art critic Paul Richard wrote in 1975. "She pours, she looks, she pours again. . . . The color seems to move, to billow. Her outlines grow from inside out."
In 1953, two D.C. painters, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, were invited to Ms. Frankenthaler's studio by her lover at the time, the powerful critic Clement Greenberg. The artists were so struck by the painting, in which the color and surface blended into one, that they returned to Washington with a new vision.
They made the manipulation of color the focus of their art and soon launched what became known as the Washington Color School or, more broadly, "color-field" painting.
"She showed us the way to think about and use color," Noland later said.
Although she was considered a charter member of the color-field school, Ms. Frankenthaler resisted artistic labels. And although she was one of the foremost female artists of her time, yet she said she had no interest in being a part of the feminist movement.
In the 1960s, she switched from oil to acrylics and began to use sponges, brushes and squeegees to spread paint across the surface. She made important advances in printmaking, tapestries and woodcuts. In almost all of her work, she followed a private aesthetic vision that valued a soft beauty that was often at odds with the bravura, more aggressive styles followed by many male artists.
"Painting is very private and personal," she told The Post in 1972. "There's an emotional content, but I'm more involved in the light and color and drawing of a painting. I don't set out to portray an emotion."
"What concerns me when I work," she told the Times in 1989, "is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?"
Helen Frankenthaler was born Dec. 12, 1928, in New York City and was the daughter of a judge. She attended private schools and graduated in 1949 from Bennington College in Vermont.
She came back to New York to paint and immediately drew the attention of Greenberg, who introduced her to major artists, including Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.
In 1958, Ms. Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell, another key figure in abstract expressionism. They were divorced in 1971.
Survivors include her husband of 17 years, Stephen M. DuBrul Jr.; and two stepdaughters.
Ms. Frankenthaler had retrospectives at many major museums throughout her career, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Gallery of Art. In 1975, she made a long-term loan of "Mountains and Sea" to the National Gallery, which has 28 of her works in its collection.
Ms. Frankenthaler had a patrician, often aloof manner and seldom liked to cast light on the creative energies behind her work.
Many of her paintings suggested imaginary landscapes, with a latent undercurrent of emotion, but Ms. Frankenthaler insisted that her central interest was simply putting paint on canvas in an interesting way.
An unprecedented region-wide collaboration that includes more than 60 cultural partners, 60+ exhibitions, dozens of galleries and an eleven-day performance art festival in celebration of the rise of the Los Angeles art scene.
An experimental city by all accounts, Los Angeles has been variously described as an "earthly paradise," a "huge desert encampment," a "city of dreadful joy," or, more recently, a "city of quartz." A place at once raw and compelling, it spawned an art that is equally multifaceted, bringing new materials, visions, and technical skills to the project of radical artistic innovation.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a collaboration between the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute, documents the emergence of Los Angeles as an international nexus of contemporary art after World War II. It culminates in a series of over forty concurrent exhibitions across Southern California in fall 2011.
An experimental city by all accounts, Los Angeles has been variously described as an "earthly paradise," a "huge desert encampment," a "city of dreadful joy," or, more recently, a "city of quartz." A place at once raw and compelling, it spawned an art that is equally multifaceted, bringing new materials, visions, and technical skills to the project of radical artistic innovation.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a collaboration between the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute, documents the emergence of Los Angeles as an international nexus of contemporary art after World War II. It culminates in a series of over forty concurrent exhibitions across Southern California in fall 2011.
Takashi Murakami helps Google celebrate summer (and winter) solstice.
Takashi Murakami is famous for his brightly colored, Superflat creations that draw from manga, anime and other aspects of Japanese pop culture. On Tuesday, Murakami contributed designs featured on the Google homepage to celebrate both the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.
The summer solstice is the longest day of the year and signifies the first day of summer. It occurs when the Earth's axis achieves its greatest tilt toward the sun. Conversely, the winter solstice occurs in the opposite hemisphere on exactly the same day.
Tuesday's Google doodles feature Murakami's signature alien-like creatures rendered in his trademark style. In 2007, L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art held a retrospective of Murakami's artwork. The exhibition, titled "Copyright Murakami," drew record crowds to the museum's space at the Geffen Contemporary.
Ed Ruscha: On the Road June 4, 2011 - October 2, 2011
This exhibition, organized by Hammer chief curator Douglas Fogle, brings together two great visionaries of art and language - Ed Ruscha and Jack Kerouac. Both men revolutionized the transparent use of words to document and comment on the shifting character of the American cultural landscape.
In 1951, Kerouac wrote On the Road on his typewriter as a continuous 120 foot-long scroll, feverishly recording in twenty days his experiences during road trips in the U.S. and Mexico in the late 1940s. With its publication in 1957, Kerouac was acknowledged as the leading voice of the Beat Generation, a group of writers that included Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs.
Over the last few years Ed Ruscha has continued to explore his own fascination with the shifting emblems of American life by turning his keen aesthetic sensibility to Kerouac's classic novel. Having created his own limited edition artist book version of On the Road in 2009 published by Gagosian Gallery and Steidl, and illustrated with photographs that he took, commissioned, or found, Ruscha has created an entirely new body of paintings and drawings that take their inspiration from passages in Kerouac's novel.
As Douglas Fogle suggests, "It is completely fitting that Ed Ruscha would take up the challenge of looking at Kerouac's On the Road. In many ways Ruscha's entire career has offered an artistic corollary to Kerouac's linguistic portrait of the American landscape, giving concrete visual form to the poetry of our vernacular roadside. These new works are no different except that they channel one of the greatest chroniclers of the American landscape by appropriating and artistically framing fragmented instances of Kerouac's language."
This exhibition includes Ruscha's edition of Kerouac's legendary novel, six large paintings on canvas, and ten drawings on museum board, each taking its text from On the Road. Whether painted over snow-capped mountains in Ruscha's signature all-caps lettering or drawn atop delicately spattered abstract backgrounds, Kerouac's words provide the artist with a means to explore his own archetypal landscape. Isolating key sentences and phrases from the novel for his paintings and drawings such as "In California you chew the juice out of grapes and spit away the skin, a real luxury," "the holy con man began to eat," or "fit and slick as a fiddle," Ruscha adds another layer of deadpan aesthetic analysis to Kerouac's original and radical use of language.
This exhibition is made possible by a major gift from The Brotman Foundation of California. Generous support is provided by Lannan Foundation, Michael Rubel and Kristin Rey, The Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, and Linda and Jerry Janger.
KCRW 89.9 FM is the official media sponsor of the exhibition.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Opens Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective April 13, 2011-August 28, 2011
This first retrospective of drawings by the contemporary American artist Richard Serra (b. 1939) presents a comprehensive overview of some forty years of his drawing activity. It traces the development of drawing as an art form independent from yet linked to his sculptural practice. Drawing for Serra has always played a crucial role in the investigation of new concepts and new creative methods. It has been a means of exploration of formal and perceptual relationships between the artwork and the viewer. His innovative ideas have radically transformed the traditional understanding of drawing as a form outlined against a background of the paper support, and exponentially expanded the definition of modern drawing through novel techniques, unusual media, monumental scale, and carefully conceived relationships to surrounding spaces.
Through some fifty drawings and a selection of sketchbooks, the exhibition presents the evolution of Serra's drawing from the early 1970s-when he worked primarily on paper with more traditional mediums such as ink, charcoal, lithographic crayon-to the mid-1970s when he turned to black paintstick, a crayon comprised of a mixture of pigment, oil, and wax. He has been using paintstick in its various forms since then, creating heavily textured works in which thick black surfaces, frequently very large in scale, emphasize his interest in process, weight, and gravity. Black, in Serra's understanding, is not a color but rather a material; it therefore has weight and responds to the laws of gravity.
In the mid-1970s, Serra made his first Installation Drawings-monumental works on canvas or linen pinned directly to the wall and thickly covered with black paintstick, such as Abstract Slavery, Taraval Beach, Pacific Judson Murphy, and Blank.
The drawings Serra has executed since the 1980s continue the experiments with innovative techniques and explore further surface effects, primarily on paper, and while very large and monumental in expression, they are less monumental physically. The process of creation remains an essential aspect of their expressive power. Generally made in series, such as Rounds (1997), out-of-rounds (1999), and Solids (2007-2008), they highlight dense paintstick, frequently pressed through a window-like screen, which allows a heavily textured surface of viscous pigment to develop.
The exhibition culminates in site-specific, large-scale works, completed specifically for this presentation. The selection of sketchbooks from different decades and places completes the understanding of the artist's use of drawing as a system of thinking.
The exhibition is made possible in part by the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund.
It was organized by the Menil Collection, Houston.
Andy Warhol Painting Bought for $1,600 Could Fetch $30 Million at Christie's Sale
NEW YORK, N.Y (REUTERS).- An Andy Warhol self-portrait purchased in 1963 for $1,600 on an installment plan is poised to fetch $30 million or more when it hits the auction block at Christie's in May.
"Self-Portrait," a four-panel acrylic silkscreen depicting the pop artist wearing a trench coat and sunglasses, is being sold by the family of Detroit collector Florence Barron.
Barron first commissioned Warhol to paint her portrait, but changed her mind and suggested the young artist depict himself, telling him, "Nobody knows me ... They want to see you."
The result was Warhol's first self portrait, four images taken in a coin-operated photo booth rendered in hues of blue.
"My mother didn't look at collecting in terms of 'is this important or not important,'" Guy Barron told Reuters.
"She looked at it from the standpoint of what resonated with her, and of 'I want to live with it.' It was not done as some people do today, as wall power."
The portrait graced the living room wall of the family home in Detroit. It also went on public display, serving as the cover image for catalogs from major Warhol exhibitions and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.
Brett Gorvy, Christie's international co-head and deputy chairman for post-war and contemporary art, said the work marked the beginning of Warhol's own stardom.
"With dark sunglasses an oblivious gaze, Warhol was ahead of his time in creating a new archetype of glamour," Gorvy said.
"The painting is remarkable not only for its visual impact and the introduction of the photo booth genre, but for marking a key moment in the history of art, when Warhol takes his place in the pantheon of celebrity alongside Marilyn, Elizabeth and Elvis."
Barron, whose family includes two married sons and several grandchildren, said they were auctioning the work because "dividing is not possible, so selling makes the most sense."
"I feel that Andy Warhol himself would appreciate this, because he always talked about everyone in their lifetime having their turn in the spotlight for 15 minutes. Who'd have thought that his self-portrait would play such a role in our lives?"
The record for a Warhol self-portrait is $32.6 million set last May at Sotheby's in New York. The record price for any Warhol sold at auction is "Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)," which Christie's sold for a whopping $71.7 million in 2007.
LACMA TO HOST EXHIBITION OF VIJA CELMINS WORK CREATED IN LOS ANGELES BETWEEN 1964 AND 1966
(Los Angeles, February 1, 2011) The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966, exploring an essential yet often overlooked period of the artist's work. Throughout much of her career, Vija Celmins has been internationally recognized for her meticulously executed paintings and drawings using a monochrome palette of black and gray, depicting starry night skies, ocean waves, barren desert floors, and fragile spider webs. But the images that first grounded her interest as a young artist in Los Angeles during the early 1960s are characterized by violent themes such as crashing warplanes, smoking handguns, and other images of death and disaster influenced by the violence of the era-the war in Vietnam, social change, political assassinations-and the mass media that represented it: newspapers, magazines, and television.
Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Menil Collection, Houston, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966 is the first exhibition to concentrate on an important segment of Celmins's art dictated by a specific time and subject matter. Recent survey exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, have concentrated on her drawings and prints, respectively. Bringing together paintings and sculptures from national and international museums and private collections, all from a brief three-year period, this exhibition uncovers the technical and thematic groundwork from which Celmins would build her international career.
The exhibition curators are Franklin Sirmans, the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, and Menil Collection Associate Curator Michelle White. "It was between 1964 and 1966, before she was 30 years old, that Celmins created some of her most important pieces in her Venice Beach studio," said Sirmans. "She was aware of what was happening politically and socially in the world via television, newspapers, and magazines, and thus her work evolved-entwined with time and memory of family and growing up."
When Celmins arrived in Los Angeles in 1962, the city's art scene was realizing its final break with Abstract Expressionism, forging a coolly detached Pop Art aesthetic unique to Southern California. With Walter Hopps's Ferus Gallery at its epicenter, artists such as Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and Ed Ruscha offered stylistic alternatives to both Abstract Expressionism's action painting and New York's bold version of Pop Art. The city's artists sought inspiration in found art and the painting of common everyday objects, creating a fluid new language to critique the decade's increasingly commercialized and media-driven culture. Though often associated with the Pop artists of the 1960s, Celmins's work is equally indebted to Conceptualism.
Never fully linked to the California Pop movement, Celmins is often overlooked as an important figure in post-Abstract Expressionist art. Television and Disaster brings to light the artist's ability to appropriate the media of her era-from newspapers and magazines to snapshots and television-to speak to her own background, while offering a distinctive contribution to this cool and aloof aesthetic. Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and fled with her family to Germany in advance of the Soviet army's invasion in 1944. Migrating to the United States in 1948 after World War II, the family settled in Indianapolis, where Celmins took art classes and graduated from the John Herron Art Institute with a BFA. In 1961 she received a scholarship to attend the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, where she met artists Brice Marden and Chuck Close. A year later, Celmins relocated to the West Coast to attend graduate school in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has lived and worked primarily in New York since 1981.
Credit: This exhibition is co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Menil Collection, Houston. It comes to LACMA from The Menil Collection where it opened on November 18, 2010, and continues through February 20, 2011
Images: #1) Vija Celmins, Burning Man, 1966, McKee Gallery, NY, c. Vija Celmins 2011 #2) Vija Celmins, Tulip Car #1, 1966, McKee Gallery, NY, c. Vija Celmins 2011 #3) Vija Celmins, Gun with Hand #1, 1964, Menil Collection, c. Vija Celmins 2011
