For almost six decades, Helen Frankenthaler has been one of the most innovative and influential painters in American art. Since her first solo show in 1951 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, her large-scale paintings have been admired for their luminous colors and lyrical gestures, realized through an innovative stain technique. This technique, which involves spreading thinned oil paint on an unprimed canvas, gave her the freedom and flexibility to paint across the canvas in eloquent gestures and avoid the thick surface texture that resulted from Jackson Pollock’s all-over dripped and poured method. While Frankenthaler’s starting point was the work of her immediate predecessors, the abstract expressionists, her innovative paint-handling techniques represented a departure from their methods. Painter Morris Louis called her “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible,” and much subsequent discussion of Frankenthaler’s work has centered on this rupture with traditional art.

Curated by independent curator and critic Karen Wilkin, Frankenthaler and the Masters: The Source Paintings will focus on an aspect of her art that has rarely been discussed and never been examined as a coherent body of work: her relationship with her aesthetic ancestors. Throughout her career, Frankenthaler has been engaged in a lively dialogue with artists from the distant as well as the recent past. Works by Jacopo Bassano, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Pierro della Francesca, Carel Fabritius, Francisco Goya, Hiroshige, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Rembrandt, Pierre Renoir, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, James McNeill Whistler, and Francisco Zurbaran, among others, have served as points of departure for her own improvisatory abstractions. Frankenthaler and the Masters will bring together a collection of these source paintings, including many rarely seen works from the artist’s own collection. Exploring the relationship between Frankenthaler’s abstractions and the works that inspired them will suggest new ideas about the artist’s use of color and the way she tests the limits of abstraction—and provide new insights about the work of one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century.

*This is when the tour is expected to begin. The exact date will depend upon the needs of the participating institutions.

For more information, contact Curator Lisa Small at 212.988.7700 ext. 225 or lsmall@afaweb.org.