Frankenthaler burst onto the New York painting scene in the early 1950s, combining the formal innovations and working methods of artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock with her own signature technique: the soak-stain. With the soak-stain, Frankenthaler thinned oil paint with turpentine to create a luminous wash of paint that soaked completely into the unprimed canvas, as seen in Fire, c. 1964. 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.   

 

 There is a physicality to Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique, too, that resonates with the depth of emotion and interpretation that the viewer finds in her work. Photographer Alexander Liberman visited Frankenthaler’s studio circa 1964, where he captured the creation of Fire in a series of dynamic portraits—bringing the “action” of “action painting” to life. Liberman’s images reveal how bodily Frankenthaler’s painting process was: like Jackson Pollock, she spread her canvases on the floor of her studio to best brush and pour her brilliant expanses of color across them. In some images, Frankenthaler is standing, sock-footed, on the canvas itself; in others, she kneels, a bucket of paint in her hands. Fire, then, which seems to hold a distant horizon in its depth (perhaps with the orange orb, at center, like a setting sun), is all the more impressive, given the flatness inherent to her grounded working method.

 

Fire was featured in the landmark 2016 exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, at the Denver Art Museum. The first comprehensive museum exhibition of its kind, the show presented female artists working in Abstract Expressionism, whose accomplishments and innovations were historically overshadowed by those of their male peers. Frankenthaler, however, can be seen as an exception to this gendered rule, for even in her own time, she was lauded as an artist of extraordinary talent. In 1960, for instance, she was honored with a solo retrospective exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, and she had solo exhibitions of her work at prestigious galleries across North America and Europe each year of that decade. Fire has been in the same family collection for fifty years, since 1973.

 

Fire, with its rich expanses of bright color, is as exemplary as any of Frankenthaler’s early soak-stain works, creating an emotionally resonant depth of field in the artist’s signature style, while also signaling Frankenthaler's adept anticipation of 1960s trends in painting. Significantly, Fire is a soak-stain painting executed in oils; in the mid-1960s, the artist transitioned to using acrylic paints, and thus Fire is more closely aligned, in material terms, with the innovations that first brought Frankenthaler critical acclaim. Frankenthaler’s combination of turpentine and oil creates a distinct haloing effect on the raw canvas that acrylic paint cannot achieve. This effect is visible at the edges of the layers of paint in Fire, as the red bleeds into the orange at top left, for instance. From Liberman’s images, we can see how Frankenthaler allowed the paint to seep and spread across the canvas—in the four blots of scarlet, visible in one image, which we see expanded into bands of color in the final work. Frankenthaler’s practice is one of both expansion and contraction, as she allows her paintings to grow across the canvas, then crops them down to the most effective composition. The process is both dynamic and controlled; in Fire, Frankenthaler places a ruler against the band of ochre running across the bottom of the canvas—one can see the halo of this tool in the final composition, emphasizing the horizontal flow of this golden field of color.

 

Fire’s evocative title acts as an interpretive key to Frankenthaler’s abstraction. As E.A. Carmean, Jr., explains, critics and scholars have long used Frankenthaler’s titles to read images, moods, and associations into her abstract, landscape-like expanses.ⁱ With Fire, pools of fire-engine red center the composition, their soak-stained forms splashed in sharp relief against passages of blank canvas and patches of goldenrod and indigo. A circle of burnt orange arches around the red center, echoing the ochre and umber-toned horizon lines at the lower edge, while a curving expanse of forest green swells up at the left, almost like a tree trunk. It is as if the viewer is watching a fire grow from a distance, perhaps taking shelter behind a tree as flames race across a prairie. 

 

The potential for such rich interpretation, Carmean argues, derives from “the intersection of two different kinds of place in [Frankenthaler’s] art.”ⁱⁱ The first is the physical place of the painting itself, as an environment the viewer is looking into, an imagined environment that Frankenthaler creates through the act of painting. The second kind of place is the “real world” of physical places and artistic inspirations in Frankenthaler’s everyday life. Indeed, the horizontal canvases and panoramic painted expanses of Frankenthaler’s oeuvre, Fire included, often encourage comparisons to physical landscapes and landscape paintings. And while Frankenthaler was hesitant to accept the gendered reading of her abstract work as particularly natural (“[my work] has no more to do with nature… than the greatest Pollocks or Monets have to do with nature,” she once said), she agreed that, admittedly “the references [to landscape] are there,” for herself and her male peers, too.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

“Anything that has beauty and provides order (rather than chaos or shock alone), anything resolved in a picture (as in nature) gives pleasure—a sense of rightness, as in being one with nature… It is an order familiar and new at the same time.”
—Helen Frankenthaler

 

The confluence of two senses of place, shifting between real and imagined, physical and painted, allow for the rich blossoming of feeling, mood, and emotion experienced when encountering works like Fire. Frankenthaler’s dual evocation of real and imagined space gives her viewer a choice of emotional experience. The viewer can stand in the expansive feeling of an open landscape—a burning prairie, perhaps—or dive into the introspection of an abstract color field. As Frankenthaler herself explains, “in my art I’ve moved and have been able to grow. I’ve been someplace. Hopefully, others should be similarly moved.”^iv

 

Leading Frankenthaler scholar John Elderfield identifies the movement between depth and flatness as a key feature of Frankenthaler’s work in the early 1960s. He interprets this tension as the result of the artist’s engagement with the developing aesthetics of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Color Field painting.^v In Fire, for instance, Frankenthaler’s crisp, flat, and clear planes of color anticipate the printmaking aesthetics of Pop artists, while the brightness of her colors connects to advertising’s influence on Pop. Her fields of color fill the canvas to its edges. They are unambiguous and distinct, despite their soak-stained edges, drawing on the reserved, emotive power of the burgeoning Minimalists. However, it would be a mistake, says Elderfield, to see Frankenthaler’s engagement with the movements of her time as simply passing, or derivative. “Frankenthaler’s art of the 1960s, like that of the 1950s,” he writes, “is affirmatively of its time as well as exceptional in it.”^vi

 

 

ⁱ  E.A. Carmean, Jr., Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 7.

ⁱⁱ  Ibid., p. 8.

ⁱⁱⁱ Helen Frankenthaler, quoted in Alexandra Schwartz, et al., As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings, exh. cat., Clark Institute, Williamstown, 2017, p. 13.

^iv  Frankenthaler, quoted in Carmean, Jr., p. 8.

^v  John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1989, pp. 139-141.

^vi  Ibid., p. 141.