Helen Frankenthaler was undoubtedly the most important and best -known abstract expressionist of the United States alongside Lee Krasner. No painter in front of her and after her, basically incompatible colors put in harmoniously fluid side by side. In addition, as an inventor of the “Soak Stained” technique-she may be considered a color tear of the unclassed canvas to generate paradoxical flat-deep image zones-and is one of the founders of color field painting.
The coupling of “abstract expressionism”, “invention of color field painting” and “USA” should have been relativized for a long time. Not only was Frankenthaler's Jewish mother Martha born in Wiesbaden-Igstadt, a few kilometers from the current place of the largest exhibition in Germany for almost thirty years last year Reinhard Ernst (MRE), so that Helen already took up a shaken measure of old Europe as a toddler.
Her teacher Hans Hofmann from the Summer School in the American Providecetown, who vehemently encouraged her to the painting career, dates from the tranquil town of Weißenburg in Franconia, and even more important influence – the pioneer of the apparently great American color field painting – Joseph Albers with his serial homage onto flat, born in Bottrop.
What should the genealogy? Especially in the often Europe and European art history as well as its avant -garde of early modernity as an indispensable basis for your own work, Helen Frankenthaler is essential for the deeper understanding of her work to point out the roots of post -war modernism on the old continent and the central intermediary of the emigrants.
Ungrunded rock like in Lascaux and Altamira
If you bridle the extremely remarkable Wiesbaden exhibition from behind and take this to the five halls with a total of 32 Frankenthalers (from 50 in the possession of the museum) preceded quote as a motto seriously, that in the penultimate hall “you never give anything out of the past”, which is never necessary to the cliché of American zero and complete re -findings.
The picturesque memory of their travels to the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux in “Cave Memory” from 1959 – like Frankenthaler's pictures on unknown canvas, are also obvious – and the conscious connection to large role models in the monumental landscape “for Hiroshige” from 1981.
What is meant by the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshigen as an unreachable master of the graphic from the first half of the 19th century, of which Frankenthaler owned one of the most charming color woodcuts from the series “Hundred famous views by Edo”. However, while Hiroshigen, however, cheeks the viewer look cheeky on the butt of a dark red -brown horse with gold -tied hooves, Frankenthaler takes over only three of the hooves in a very enlarged form from the graphic, mixes the dark brown of the horse with the gold glossy hooves to a beige and leaves the whole thing in a green fund, not without a strong red ribbon with the racel To pull – interestingly one year after Gerhard Richter invented the abstract squeegee images in 1980. Color as a material and the sublime relief to be scanned with the eyes meets soac-stained hooves that seep into unclassed canvas.
The sails of the ships can still be seen in their early ports
This eye -opening melange richest influences – from cave caves to Japanese character cosmes – offers itself in a continent overstating panorama. Frankenthaler's early painting “Provincetown Harbor” from 1950 (a port view with semi -abstract sail in a wild mix of characterful KandinSky and sail in a continent. Feininger-Schifflein) and “The Bay” from 1957 in the immediate vicinity of the work of its teacher Hans Hofmann (with “The Hedge”, as Frankenthaler's “Hafen” was also created in 1950 in Provincetown, which shows a completely different abstract and thorough hedge made of pastosem scour “Provincetown” picture) and the mentor Adolph Gottlieb with the ball picture “Two Bars”, whose flat circles quoted her in her homage “Green Moon”.
The friends Friedel Dzubas (also Hofmann-Schüler with the monumental “Argonaut”), Lee Krasner in the secondary hall as a wife of the Frankenthaler friend Jackson Pollock and Kenneth Noland as well as pictures of the partner for at least thirteen years, Robert Motherwell. In addition, the spirit of her mentor and temporary partner Clement Greenberg, the most important art critic of the United States and inventors of the Flatnesshence the area painting.
The fact that the exhibition title “Move and Make”, “Moving and Making” instead of remaining – how your quote continues – is more than justified is particularly evident in the impressive “tower room” of the house with its pyramid dome, internally called cathedral. “There is no, always'. No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you to where it has to go, ”says the large formats and emphasizes Frankenthaler credo of the artist's will to change over fifty years, but also the gently controlled loss of control. Where many abstract at that time as post -pubescent gesture of alleged indomitability, Frankenthaler steered with a beauty offensive against it.
Oh how beautiful is “Barcelona”
Her most beautiful color has ever been painted is “Barcelona” from 1987. As in “Palestrina” and “Fenice” the picture title is already shining here, he can mean the city or the composer or the theater, in the case of “Barcelona” the big city and cultural metropolis with integrated bathing beach, the earwig Freddie and Montserrat Caballés or a tribute Gaudí and Miró. Squilling the strongly diluted color in long lanes, just as she needs it.
And how often with her (for example in “Sea Level”, which despite the title brings the rather horizontal sea into the vertical), it is a subsequent overturned landscape format that abstracts the flowing transition from sand -colored beach, brownish mountains/sea and green horizont. In addition to the flash of eyes of the green-brown, she uses pearl-gloss color, which would have simply caused kitsch with most of the painters, but only reinforces the aesthetics of the image.
Everything flows in the painting of the passionate swimmer, who, due to the early success, painted several houses with a fantastic lake and sea view and mixed the moist element plentiful into her colors. Like Pollock, she stood on the floor in the middle of the rolled -up canvases and poured the color into white as a nose. On Frankenthaler's portrait format “Lunar Avenue” from 1975, three color fountains hissed high in the white primed picture space and far beyond in the real.
And on “Spanning” from 1971, four color continents coming from the edges drift with a restless bank contour in a balance tense up to tearing parallel to the outside and into the empty sea of the image inside, where you just hold a breath of pencil lines and colored pencil threads together. If you remember that in the year of the picture of the picture, her marriage diverge with Motherwell, once again the narrow Nexus of felt color and flow is shown.
Helen Frankenthaler. Move and make. Museum Reinhard Ernst Wiesbaden; until September 28th. The catalog costs 29.90 euros.
