Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)

“Nevertheless, there is a special, personal character to these pictures. It has something to do with their small scale (relative to her larger canvases) and something to do with the sense of freedom paper engenders. Paper is so commonplace, so familiar, that it can be attached with particular insouciance. A roll of pristine canvas is serious and slightly inhibiting, a sheet of paper is casual and friendly. As a result, Frankenthaler’s works on paper appear to be more immediate than her canvases and possibly demonstrate her thinking with special directness. They constitute an intimate record of her evolution that parallels and sometimes even anticipates the development of her large-scale canvases. It is a prodigious body of work, a staggering number of ink and crayon drawings, watercolors, gouaches, oils, acrylics, pastels, even some collages, spanning thirty-five years. Frankenthaler herself describes this large and varied portion of her production as ‘how I fought out my dialogue with a piece of paper’”. (K. Wilken, Frankenthaler: Works on Paper, 1949-1984, George Braziller in association with the International Exhibition Foundation, New York, 1985)