A thematic focus on Helen Frankenthaler’s engagement with Asian art—both directly, in the woodcuts which have been a major part of her oeuvre from her first, East and Beyond (1973), to her most recent, Weeping Crabapple (2009), but also, less directly, seemingly through the awareness of Asian bru... Read more
A thematic focus on Helen Frankenthaler’s engagement with Asian art—both directly, in the woodcuts which have been a major part of her oeuvre from her first, East and Beyond (1973), to her most recent, Weeping Crabapple (2009), but also, less directly, seemingly through the awareness of Asian brushwork and painterly effects, and the conceptual influence both of ukiyo-e, the transitory and evanescent nature of things, and the principle of yin yang, the complementary interdependence of dualities in nature—allows a fresh look at the artist and her singularly important place in the art history of postwar abstraction.
Many of the paintings in this exhibition surely echo an Eastern sensibility through their titles: among them, New York Bamboo (1957), Yangtze (1979), For Hiroshige (1981), Japanese Brush (1983), and YinYang (1990)—a painting in which Frankenthaler seems to look not only at the dualities of the natural world but also the tensions between Eastern and Western traditions in art. Other works, however, rely solely on visual means to suggest Asian affinities: including Cloister (1969), with its Haiku-like composition; the
vertical, calligraphic, On the Cusp (1985); and Silent Wish (1973), Green and Beyond (1979), and Brother Angel (1983), which convey a sense of journey through a landscape similar to that found in classical Chinese painting. Frankenthaler’s interest in Asian art may be said to have had one apogee in 1983, when the artist traveled to Japan to work on the woodcut Cedar Hill, using traditional ukiyo-e techniques.
