"They were all raised on Park Avenue, educated at Bennington College, and classified as second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but I have trouble seeing them as one and the same. The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel."
"On October 26th, in her studio on West Twenty-third Street, Frankenthaler painted "Mountains and Sea." It was a turning point for her career and for art history both. Instead of treating the "blank" canvas as some heroic arena where a painter goes to battle with predecessors or inner demons, Frankenthaler saw it for what it was: thousands of off-white porous fibres, usually cotton duck or linen, woven together into a deceptively smooth surface."
"For centuries, painters had primed canvases, building up layers of thick pigment and glaze to create the illusion of luminosity and depth. But Frankenthaler diluted her paints with turpentine, so that they'd stain the raw canvas like blood on a bedsheet. She once described the act of painting as "murder (but great)." All five paintings in the show are mounted in MOMA 's second-floor atrium, and you can either spend an hour with each or swivel around to ingest them in a single visual gulp."
A small MoMA exhibition presents five Frankenthaler canvases that vary widely in visual character and resist easy categorization. The works evoke other artists yet maintain a decisive, anti-cliché sensibility. A 1952 painting, Mountains and Sea, marked a pivotal shift when she soaked diluted pigments into raw, unprimed canvas rather than building up glazes. She thinned paint with turpentine so stains penetrated the fibres, producing luminous, integrated color fields. The installation permits sustained viewing or rapid visual intake, emphasizing paint's autonomy and Frankenthaler's transformation of material, surface, and process. Her phrase "murder (but great)" signals a radical rethink of painterly engagement.
Read at The New Yorker
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