A breathtaking masterpiece spanning more than eight feet in width, Helen Frankenthaler’s Eye of the Storm is a test.mes nt to her innovative and charismatic approach to painting in the 1980s. Still on the high of a period of leading success in the mid- to late-1970s, Frankenthaler enhanced her practice with even further complexity and dynamism; she infused clumps of pigment within the spills of saturated color, demonstrating a more painterly approach to applying pigment to the canvas. This new approach to painting was, in many ways, a mélange of her varied methods that had come before: “In 1982 she impulsively, even frantically, explores many new [options] that, while derived and developed from earlier ones, begin a more drastic overhauling of the possibilities of her art than before” (John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York 1989, pp. 334-35). As a more mature artist, Frankenthaler makes space for experimentation and liberates her approach to the canvas, even further entrenching her oeuvre in the values that guide her practice. Executed in 1982, Eye of the Storm is an exceptional example from this experimentally fecund moment in Frankenthaler’s career as an artist; one cannot help but be swept away in its swirling velocity—it has current.

In many ways, Frankenthaler’s practice in the 1980s echoes her earliest Color Field works, her signature form of abstractions which marked a departure from the mainstream mythic narrative and style of Abstract Expressionism—these early works still employed line and form to evoke rhythm. Her most iconic early painting from 1952, Mountains and Sea, seems to swirl frantically, similarly to Eye of the Storm; the present work, however, incorporates her approach to painting employed in the 1970s—applying washes of pigment to the canvas, soaking the surface with varying densities of hue. While her paintings of the 1970s aimed to reflect the metaphysical and the emotional, her works in the 1980s return some attention to the interplay of formal elements within the painting, bringing focus to the surface of the canvas itself. Passages of muted purple, rust, and sage rush horizontally across the canvas, evidence of Frankenthaler’s process of pouring paint made abundantly clear. Dancing lines of pigment run parallel, echoing the saturated expanses of paint, while two saturated discs—one royal blue, one a deep navy—hover among the swaths of pigment.

Frankenthaler’s method of pouring diluted acrylic paint onto the unprimed, unstretched canvas largely inspired the Color Field movement on the whole. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, both little-known artists at the t.mes , visited her studio in 1953 and were inspired by Frankenthaler’s departure from the narrative of Abstract Expressionism of the t.mes , dominated by an active, masculine energy. The Color Field school, rather, opted for the pure beauty of color on the canvas. While this was a step away from the mythic tales of Abstract Expressionist artists, Color Field painters did not fully separate themselves from conceptual approaches to painting. In Frankenthaler’s paintings of the 1980s, the formal qualities are a fusion of the metaphorical and the purely formal; “Metaphors are uncovered in the making of these works. But the artist does not paint.mes taphors. Part of the force of these works is undoubtedly metaphorical. Their forms evoke different but similar forms and they allow of our visual substitutions. But another part of their force, and I think the larger part, resists such substitutions, at least checks them. We cannot forget how literally themselves these forms are, not only because they are tangible and individual (this is not always the case in Frankenthaler’s art), but also because they so belong where they do.” (John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York 1989, p. 335)

With its breathtaking rhythm and potential energy, Eye of the Storm bears witness to a moment of both investigation and innovation in Frankenthaler’s practice. Throughout the many chapters of her oeuvre, Frankenthaler, above all, demonstrates what it truly means to evoke emotions entwined with appreciation for the formal qualities of painting. Describings her paintings, Frankenthaler explained, "A line, a color, shapes, spaces, all do one thing for and within themselves, and yet do something else, in relation to everything that is going on within the four sides [of the canvas]. A line is a line, but [also] is a color. . . . It does this here, but that there. The canvas surface is flat and yet the space extends for miles. What a lie, what trickery—how beautiful is the very idea of painting." ( Exh. Cat, Gagosian Gallery, New York, Helen Frankenthaler, Line into Color: Color into Line, 1962-1987, 2016)

Artist

Helen Frankenthaler