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Helen Frankenthaler’s Late Works

Today we’re highlighting images collected in Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988-2009 published in 2022 by Santa Fe’s Radius Books. The book developed alongside a traveling exhibit of Frankenthaler’s later work organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and features writing by Elizabeth Smith, Suzanne Boorsch, and Douglas Dreishpoon, the director and editor of the ongoing Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné. Our copy comes to us as a gift of Radius Books.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was a major post-war abstract expressionist painter. She developed the soak-stain technique and was known for her large-scale paintings, and work that seemed spontaneous and whole – regardless of process. In a lecture at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 1996, Frankenthaler details this process:

I seem to have consistently been involved in two approaches to my work. One is an immediate gesture in which my wrist seems to know exactly where to go, where to place what, when, in which color, when to stop. It is an economical vocabulary, a shorthand. The other is far more labored, worked-into…. In either case, any beautiful picture to me looks as if it’s been born at once, regardless of how many hours, or weeks, or years it took to make it.

Frankenthaler remained dynamic in her work over six decades. She continued to develop mastery of forms. As Boorsch explains in an essay on Frankenthaler’s prints, her late works “surpass” the output of her previous three decades “in size, in complexity, in audacious innovation, and in powerful effect.”

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

See more posts about spectacular work from Radius Books!