In her new studio in the woods of Cape Cod during the summer of 1967, Helen Frankenthaler created Head of the Meadow, a work situated in the pantheon of paintings in which her stain technique crystallized into breathtaking vistas of pure color. Executed during a time when she was making some of her best paintings to date, Head of the Meadow is a superb example from the body of work she executed while splitting time between New York and Provincetown, which presaged the monumental paintings of land, sky, and water she would paint later in her career. Soon after its completion, Head of the Meadow became the first work by Frankenthaler that Andy Williams, the now legendary singer behind such classics as “Moon River,” added to his budding collection of modern and contemporary art, in which the painting remained for decades. 

“I really fell in love with Color Field because I just like color”
— Andy Williams

Head of the Meadow is a painting filled with intimations of summer, sea and nature. Billowing fields of blue, yellow and green paint converge on the vast canvas just as ocean meets land. Together with masterpieces such as Indian Summer, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and Flood, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, both 1967, this painting captures the culminating moment of one of the most experimental and productive periods in Frankenthaler’s career. The significance of Frankenthaler’s experience in Cape Cod was recently subject to the exhibition Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.

“Back then, there was little to do in Provincetown except your work. It really forced you to connect with your work and with the people around you, your family and close friends” — Lise Motherwell

By the time of the creation of Head of the Meadow, she was already widely known for pioneering the revolutionary soak-stain technique. It had been following her pivotal visit to Jackson Pollock’s studio, and encounter of his ink works on paper, that Frankenthaler created her seminal Mountains and Sea in 1952: her first work created by pouring thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas, which would prove influential to artists such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis and mark the dawn of the Color Field Movement. During the summers Frankenthaler spent in Cape Cod, she began experimenting with her idiosyncratic staining method more freely and on a larger scale.

By 1963, as signaled by The Bay, Detroit Institute of Arts, the gestural quality of Frankenthaler’s earlier work dramatically gave way to all-over color fields where paint freely flows and pools like water across the canvas. Moving from using oil to diluted acrylic paint, Frankenthaler began painting color fields “as vast as Turner’s murky vistas.”[i] Embracing a larger scale was a bold move; for, as step-daughter Lise Motherwell pointed out, "making paintings that large, knowing they would be a challenge for anyone acquiring one, took a lot of courage.”[ii]

Art critic Clement Greenberg considered color fields such as Head of the Meadow as the purest form of modern painting: effectively opening up the possibilities of Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip technique, Frankenthaler’s stain method enabled a “purely optical” experience of painting. The semi-transparent expanses of variegated color that stain the canvas weave draw attention to the flatness of the picture plane, freeing it from the shackles of illusory, pictorial space and instead emphasizing it as a literal, physical surface.

“I think of my pictures as explosive landscapes, worlds and distances, held on a flat surface”
—  Helen Frankenthaler

The great music legend Andy Williams—who popularized timeless hits such as “Moon River” and “Can't Take My Eyes Off You” built an impressive collection of modern and contemporary art that included, among works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann and Franz Kline, as well as Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpiece Head of the Meadow, 1967.

While fascinated by Abstract Expressionists such as Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Williams felt a particular affinity for such Color Field artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
 
 

“Throughout my life, I have always been collecting…I could not imagine a life without paintings” — Andy Williams