Helen Frankenthaler’s On the Road, 1980, presents a wide expanse of rich sienna and maroon. One of the artist’s signature stains blooms at the center right, hemmed in by brick-like blocks of opaque brown edged in green and white, like mossy stones in a road. Luminous strokes of primary and secondary colors, plus a flash of pale pink, dance at the outer edges of the work. A wandering white line switchbacks into the upper border like a mountain trail, suggesting a distant horizon line. On the Road, like many of Frankenthaler’s compositions, reveals the deep influence of landscape on the artist’s method, though perhaps not in typical, representational terms. Rather, Frankenthaler takes inspiration from the tension between order and chaos in the natural world, embodied in the hard and soft edges of the present work.

“My pictures are… not nature per se, but a feeling, and the feeling of an order that is associated more with nature. Nature in seasons, maybe; but nature in, well, an order. I think art itself is order out of chaos, and nature is always fighting that same battle.”
—Helen Frankenthaler

On the Road is a fine example of Frankenthaler’s mature painting practice—the work graced the cover of the catalogue for her 1980 exhibition Nueue Bilder (New Work) at André Emmerich Gallery, Zurich—as she continued to find new inspiration in the unturned corners of American abstraction. She came of age at the peak of Abstract Expressionism in the United States; Mountains and the Sea, 1952, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, encapsulated her earliest innovations. The canvas marked the invention of Frankenthaler’s signature “soak-stain” technique, by which she thinned oil paint with turpentine to create a luminous wash that soaked completely into the unprimed canvas. The technique was, in its way, the apogee of influential critic Clement Greenberg’s definition of modern painting: in Frankenthaler’s work, paint and support became one united surface.

 

 

Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” was so impactful that Greenberg coined a new term, “Post-painterly Abstraction,” to describe it; her work forms an essential art historical connection between Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, and Minimalism.ⁱⁱ In the 1970s, Frankenthaler switched from oil paint to acrylic, which she diluted in a similar manner to achieve the wide, richly colored effect of her original soak-stains. Towards the end of the decade, she also began to recalibrate the focus of her canvases, from centering the painting’s action in the middle of the canvas, as in Mountains and the Sea, towards compositions like On the Road, which draw the eye to the edges of the painting. 1980 marks a turning point in Frankenthaler’s career, as she builds upon her work of the previous decades to expand her repertoire of painterly marks.

 

“No longer are corners and edges ignored. But since image and painting surface are coextensive now—unrolling horizontally out from the center—the corners and edges are less boundaries than before… the pictorial space seems to resonate even beyond the limits of the physical support.”
—John Elderfield

“It was the pictures with thickly-drawn clumps that she chose mainly to develop in 1980,” John Elderfield writes of Frankenthaler in his 1989 monograph on the artist.ⁱⁱⁱ Indeed, as seen in On the Road, the maroon field is punctuated by stripes of yellow and orange; pink and green marks cluster into an umber section at right. The diaphanous sienna stain is brought out by contrast to the angular white and navy marks at the top edge of the canvas. The interaction of color and line in On the Road creates a sense of depth without relying explicitly on representational forms.

 

Frankenthaler’s exploration of line and wash in On the Road intersects with her increased interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the work of Old Masters, such as Titian and Rembrandt.^iv Some of Frankenthaler’s works from this period make direct connections to older works via the abstraction of a central form or motif—the white dress and small flag of Titian’s Portrait of a Lady in White, c. 1561, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, are reproduced in Frankenthaler’s abstract terms in her own Portrait of a Lady in White, 1979. Made in the context of such quotations, On the Road takes its own visual cues from the Old Masters, albeit, in more subtle, formal terms.

 

 

As Pepe Karmel argues, Frankenthaler’s practice of the late 1970s and early 1980s uses color and line in a manner similar to “standard old master practice.”^v “Once you get to the sixteenth century, people work on a mid-value ground,” Karmel explains. “Often it’s a brown, but it can be other colors… the idea is you already have a color and then you work up to the lights and down to the shadows. So what we’re seeing [with Frankenthaler] is a rediscovery of that for modern art.”^vi On the Road deploys the earth tones of the Old Masters—sienna brown, raw umber, and rich, red maroon—in a 20^th century manner.

 

Karmel finds it difficult to overstate just how innovative this strategy is. The highly figurative Old Masters are an unexpected reference for abstract art—there’s “no room for this kind of thing” in the canonical history of abstraction, he says—a canon Frankenthaler herself is a part of.^vii On the Road embodies Frankenthaler’s drive to continue to push the limits of abstraction; nearly three decades on from Mountains and the Sea, she is still finding something new in the technique. “The richness and sophistication of Frankenthaler’s later work goes way beyond” the “very limited discourse” of the canon, Karmel says. In short, “it’s radically innovative for abstract painting.”^viii

 

 

ⁱ Helen Frankenthaler, quoted in Alexandra Schwartz, et al., As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings, exh. cat., Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA, 2017, p. 71.

ⁱⁱ Clement Greenberg, “Post-painterly Abstraction,” 1964, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, p. 304.

^iv Elderfield, 309-310.

^v Pepe Karmel, quoted in John Elderfield and Pepe Karmel, “Frankenthaler,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2019, p. 107.

^vi Ibid.

^vii Ibid.

^viii Ibid.