A Soon-to-Close Show in Florence Celebrates Helen Frankenthaler’s Audacious Experimentation
For the past few weeks, Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi has showcased the unique creative energy and uncompromising vision of painter Helen Frankenthaler, an American whose work left an indelible mark on the global art world. This extensive exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné, serves as a testament to her genius. One of the first major exhibitions dedicated to Frankenthaler outside the U.S., it masterfully unpacks the influences and exchanges that shaped her art while affirming her pivotal role in the evolution from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting.
Here, floating chromatic vibrations radiate from delicate acrylic veils draped across landscape-shaped canvases, shimmering with an interplay of translucency and transparency. These works strive to seize fleeting atmospheres and synesthetic impressions, balancing nature, light, and multi-sensory inputs in an exquisite dance.
Surveying the artist’s poetic abstractions between 1953 and 2002, the exhibition culminates with paintings on paper from the ‘90s, a lesser-known aspect of her later-career work. “As the largest Frankenthaler exhibition to date in Italy, ‘Painting Without Rules’ introduces some audiences to Frankenthaler’s work for the first time, and for those already familiar, casts her legacy in a new light,” Dreishpoon told Observer. “While her work has been previously exhibited in group shows, along with kindred contemporaries, the roundup at Palazzo Strozzi highlights formative influences and affinities.” Friendship, he added, is a pivotal part of this project, as relationships offer another way to contextualize Frankenthaler’s innovations.
Frankenthaler was one of the trailblazing women of her era, a rare talent who secured acknowledgment and recognition in a fiercely male-dominated art scene. At just twenty-two, she was among the “amazons” of the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show—a watershed moment in American abstraction. Sharing the stage with giants like Pollock, Kline and De Kooning, as well as pioneering women like Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, Frankenthaler made a bold statement. Her contribution, a painting over seven feet long, was the largest submitted. It was her way of proclaiming that her talent extended far beyond the shadow of being “Clem’s Girl”—a reference to her then-boyfriend, the formidable art critic Clement Greenberg. Unconcerned with artistic or societal limits, she hauled the massive painting from her nearby studio without asking for permission—an audacious move that epitomized her originality and unrestrained creativity, inspiring a generation of artists to follow.
The roots of her rebellious spirit likely stemmed from her upbringing in a conservative German-Jewish household as the daughter of a judge. Yet, this disciplined background may have provided her with the resilience needed to break through the glass ceilings of her time. Frankenthaler’s willingness to defy conventions and embrace freedom is beautifully encapsulated in the exhibition’s title. She consistently pushed boundaries, reimagining abstraction as a medium that could capture both the visceral and the ethereal. Her works evoke poetic allusions to natural and psycho-emotive atmospheres, blending inspiration and innovation into a singular, transcendent vision.
“Painting Without Rules” pairs Frankenthaler’s work with pieces by artists in her circle, including Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, and that of sculptors such as David Smith, Anthony Caro and Anne Truitt, highlighting Frankenthaler’s lesser-known ventures into sculptural production and offering a comprehensive view of her creative range.
In this dynamic interplay of influences and artistic exchanges, Pollock emerges as a pivotal figure who emboldened Frankenthaler to break free from conventional approaches to painting and the canvas itself. Her painting Open Wall (1953), displayed in the second room alongside Pollock’s Number 14 (1951), reflects the profound inspiration she drew from his subliminal yet purely gestural imagination. Pollock’s immersive transfer of movements, gestures, and marks onto the canvas—guided by an intense and energetic rhythm—left a lasting imprint on Frankenthaler’s approach.
Her first encounter with Pollock’s work profoundly affected her. As she recounted in her memoirs, Clem had left her alone to experience Pollock’s just-hung exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. “I was ready for what his painting gave me,” she wrote. “I was overwhelmed. His work simply seemed to resonate. It captured my eye and my whole psych metabolism at a crucial moment in my life… He opened the way for me and freed me to make my mark.” Yet even when paintings like Mountains and Sea exhibit elements inspired by Pollock, Frankenthaler imbues her work with an expansive lightness and luminosity. Her layered washes create a sense of depth and space akin to a watery surface, offering a striking contrast to the density and intensity of Pollock’s gestural marks.
The connection between her work and Robert Motherwell’s Color Field abstraction also reveals a rich dialogue of shared influences and techniques. Married to Motherwell for thirteen years, Frankenthaler’s relationship with him fostered a continuous exchange of ideas and approaches. A painting like Alassio (1960) exemplifies the vibrant sunlight and joyful atmosphere of the time they spent together in the seaside Italian town, capturing not only the warmth of their surroundings but also the collaborative spirit that was part of their union.
In sculptures like Matisse Table (1952), Frankenthaler approaches the tridimensional with the same instinctive intuition that defines her canvases. Inspired by her friends Anthony Caro and David Smith, she ventures into the realm of three-dimensionality with a sensual, alchemical attitude, transforming raw materials into imaginative yet organically fluid forms.
The show underscores Frankenthaler’s unparalleled ability to leave her mark by expanding the boundaries of poetic imagination. Her work seamlessly combines psychosomatic movements—balancing control, improvisation, and an intuitive surrender to the tidal pull of color on the canvas. This approach opens up infinite possibilities for boundless creativity, inviting viewers into a liberated realm of artistic exploration.
As her style evolved, Frankenthaler’s canvases began to feature a more complex interplay of marks and flowing paint tides, merging and agitating with magnetic energy. Her work captures the dynamic essence of matter and particles in a state of motion and transformation, vibrating with life.
Displayed chronologically, the exhibition spans from the 1950s to the early 2000s, showcasing her groundbreaking soak-stain technique, which she first discovered in 1952. By applying diluted paint to unprimed canvases, Frankenthaler achieved effects reminiscent of watercolor on a monumental scale. This technique allowed her to explore a more fluid and dynamic dimension through translucency and delicate washes.
Frankenthaler’s artistry often oscillates between layers of thicker, opaque paint and ethereal veils of diluted pigment. This interplay creates an evolving yet cohesive alchemy of color and light. Paintings in the first room, such as Movable Blue (1973), reflect her absolute mastery and confidence. She navigates the canvas physically, pouring, painting, and drawing with a spontaneous energy that builds layers and stratifications.
“I wanted my pictures to work not only on the surface and depth. Playing with ambiguity, when successful, is part of the je ne sais quoi magic that makes any picture work and gives a message,” Frankenthaler explains in a video documentary shown in the exhibition’s final room. This commitment to restless experimentation drove her process, where the only rule was to have no rules. She embraced spontaneity, welcoming creative surprises whether they led to breakthroughs or failures. “One cliché I use on myself all the time is that the one rule is no rules, and if you have a real sense of limits, then you are free to break out of them, the end,” she states in the video. Continuing in another segment, she adds, “Sometimes, for an artist, I think the aesthetic developments sneak in almost without notice, a subtle urgency, an unconsciously programmed surprise. There’s a natural order.”
Frankenthaler seems to have eventually extended this serene acceptance of discovery and experimentation to her personal life. Following her divorce from Motherwell in the early 1970s, she embarked on extensive travels across Europe and spent more time in nature, far from the bustle of New York. This introspective period of self-reflection and renewal opened her to new possibilities of awareness and experience. It also ushered in a body of work inspired by landscapes and seascapes, perhaps her most recognized creations, presented in the fifth room of the exhibition. In Ocean Drive West #1 (1974), the intense cerulean blue melds the oceanic horizons of Long Island with its vast skies, capturing a fluid moment where sea and sky dissolve into one. Sitting on the porch of her seaside home, she painted what she saw on the shoreline and what she felt internally—a fleeting moment when the summer heat, dunes, waves and her inner emotions harmonized into a single energetic oscillation.
Yet, even in this painting and others like Mornings (1971), Frankenthaler introduces bold interruptions—thicker strokes of contrasting colors like red markers, errant jabs and flashes of black. These elements disrupt the calm, hinting at the inevitability of external forces intruding on moments of tranquility. They suggest the interplay of opposing forces—the harmony and tension—that animates both nature and human existence.
Frankenthaler’s abstractions were always a pursuit of serendipitous beauty, capturing not only the essence of nature but the fertile potential of transformation within it. Reflecting on her lifelong fascination with nature in a May 2000 interview with Tim Marlow in Connecticut, she remarked, “I have always responded to the wonders of the natural environment. When I was a child, I used to take my mother to the window of my room in our apartment on the thirteenth floor in Manhattan and have her look at clouds because I was so mesmerized by what I could see out the windows, all the spaces and changes of nature.”
Her later works from the 1980s and 1990s dominate the exhibition’s final rooms, offering a poignant reflection on the passage of life and the evolution of awareness. These pieces reveal Frankenthaler in dialogue with art history, as motifs, elements and palettes from the past resurface and intertwine with her own innovations. Paintings like Eastern Light, Cathedral, and Madrid appear to effortlessly blend references as diverse as the signs of Paleolithic cave art, Monet’s waterlilies, and Titian’s dramatic interplay of light and shadow. The intricate layering of dense, physical tides of color—applied with spatulas, large brushes, and other tools—contrasts with delicate, translucent veils, creating a tension that tests the coexistence of opposing sensations and dimensions.
By the 1990s, Frankenthaler’s work took on a more existential tone. Her dense, magmatic abstractions seem to question the nature of physical and sensory experiences within the vast framework of a broader cosmic order. In works like Star Gazing (1989), marks float across deep blue atmospheres, suggesting an artist contemplating not only the infinite universe above but also the enigmatic depths within. These cosmic abstractions explore the psyche and spirit, pushing the boundaries of perception and space. Frankenthaler’s late-career works strive for an expansiveness that evokes the universal motion and evolution of all things, transcending the traditional confines of the canvas.
As the curator notes in the exhibition walkthrough essay: “Over time, we’re left with the best.” This sentiment mirrors Frankenthaler’s own philosophy, her pursuit of art liberated from constraints. Given a life lived so fully and unapologetically, there’s no reason to doubt that her legacy embodies just that.
It’s been a big year for Helen Frankenthaler’s recognition abroad
The exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi aligns with a broader initiative to elevate Helen Frankenthaler’s visibility beyond the U.S. Timed with the show’s opening last September, Gagosian Gallery in Rome unveiled a dedicated exhibition showcasing Frankenthaler’s paintings on paper. Many of these works had never been exhibited before, underscoring the pivotal role this medium played in the last decade of her career and the new compositional possibilities she explored through it.
Simultaneously, Gagosian collaborated with The Frankenthaler Foundation to publish a revised and expanded edition of Frankenthaler, John Elderfield’s seminal 1989 monograph on the artist. Released last fall, this updated volume spans the entirety of her career and includes over 300 full-color reproductions of her paintings, works on paper, prints and sculptures, along with more than 100 comparative illustrations and documentary photographs. The publication is an invaluable resource for fostering further international recognition of Frankenthaler’s contributions to redefining and expanding abstraction.
“Whilst putting together the late paintings show at Gagosian in New York last year, it was clear that during the later part of her life, working on paper was increasingly important to Helen and was something that required further examination,” Jason Ysenburg, director at Gagosian Rome, told Observer. “What we discovered—and aim to share with the public in the forthcoming exhibition in Rome—is that Helen continued to challenge herself and be as determined to push artistic boundaries as she ever was. Our show, alongside the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, presents a unique opportunity to be immersed in her remarkable career and artistic life.”
“Helen Frankenthaler: Painting Without Rules” is at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi through January 26.