“I think light creeps in. Everything has an effect, light, mood, etc... 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 window, all the spaces and changes of nature.”
Helen Frankenthaler’s Circe from 1974 submerges the viewer in an oceanic vista as aquatic veils of cobalt and cerulean blue balanced by passages of earthy ochre and rich plunges of purple culminate in a masterful panorama cascading across nine feet of canvas. Created using Frankenthaler’s signature soak-stain technique which has established her as a pioneer of Color Field painting, Circe possesses the ability to conjure vividly organic scenes through an ethereal and atmospheric dispersion of color. Attesting to its significance, Circe was featured in the traveling exhibition Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings 1969-1974 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Seattle Art Museum and Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston a year after its completion. Named after the mythological daughter of Helios (the sun god) and Perse (the ocean nympyh), Circe embodies the Greek goddess’ feminine energy, divine power and command of the elements.
Amorphous planes of rich color coalesce in Circe as brushstrokes of saffron meet in the painting’s center to construct a plateau-like form surrounded by a spectral array of deep hues. Shades of sandstone, rust and ochre surge with variations of eggplant, steel and Prussian blue; layered and shifting, the colors on Frankenthaler's canvas intentionally bleed together, establishing an abstract image that may be simultaneously interpreted as a desert vista and as a seascape. The shifting possibilities of Circe’s setting reflect the shifting emotions rendered within the painting, wherein the thermal lightness of orange mediates the cool intensity of deep blue. Holding the viewer's gaze and focusing it in on the undulating forms that comprise it. With a captivating intensity, Circe simultaneously evokes the celestial and the earthly.
Vividly undulating with rich, vibrant hues, Circe speaks to Frankenthaler’s ability to achieve the sublimity of a J. M. W. Turner landscape or Claude Monet painting without distinct form or figuration and through an economy of color. Frankenthaler was aware of the luminosity of her works, having noted: “I think light creeps in. Everything has an effect, light, mood etc.…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 window, all the spaces and changes of nature” (Tim Marlow and Helen Frankenthaler, “Now seventy-two, Frankenthaler describes the experience and occasional joy of painting abstractions,” The Art Newspaper, May 31 2000).
A pioneer of Color Field painting, Frankenthaler is an icon of postwar American abstraction. The prolific artist throughout her decades-long career acquired and demonstrated experience in varying mediums, including printmaking, ceramics and sculpture. Lauded most notably as a painter, Frankenthaler conceived of the inimitable soak-stain technique, a method involving diluting paint and letting it soak directly into unprimed canvas. First employed by the artist in 1952’s Mountains and Sea, this method is particularly visible in Circe, wherein diluted paint creates the varying hues and opacities that give the image its rhythmic and tidal composition. Extending to the outermost edges of the canvas, the colors in Circe bleed together. The soak-stain technique not only transformed Color Field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, pushing the boundaries of the very medium, but also deeply inspired Frankenthaler’s contemporaries, including such artists as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.
Executed in 1974, the present work symbolizes a pivotal t.mes in the artist’s career; Frankenthaler was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, closed her 83rd Street Studio after a decade in 1970 and divorced painter Robert Motherwell in 1971. 1974, the year Circe was conceived, was notably the year that Barbara Rose's Painted Book about the artist was published and that Frankenthaler moved to Connecticut and to create works inspired by Long Island Sound’s aquatic landscape.
Harnessing the artistic innovation of those who came before her—from Francesca to Matisse to such figures as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko—Frankenthaler carved out her own space in art history while profoundly defining the group that came to be known as the “second wave” or “second generation” of Abstract Expressionists. Unlike action painters such as Jackson Pollock who embraced the physicality of charged brushstrokes, Frankenthaler championed filling canvases with floating, watercolor-like planes of color, as illustrated so dynamically in the present work. A challenging artistic visionary and standout among her contemporaries, Frankenthaler and her vision are immortalized in the naturalistic and tempestuous Circe.
