Understanding Modern Art - Helen Frankenthaler and American Color Field Painting

Foremost amongst the American Colour Field painters is Helen Frankenthaler (1928 - ). Frankenthaler's pivotal operate Mountains and Sea (1952) is an appropriately fluid strategy to each abstraction and Colour contrast. The aquatic blues and greens are occasionally distinct and at times partially overlapping. The irregular, natural shapes are sometimes separated from both other by intervening canvas, and the colors are soft, muted and atmospheric.

In Frankenthaler's later paintings, such as the intensely colorful Tutti Frutti (1966) and the much more geometric piece entitled The Human Edge (1967), the shapes of Colour touch and overlap slightly but do not interpenetrate 1 an additional. The chromatic contrasts are definitely much more vivid than in the earlier Mountains and Sea. Even though the tints in all 3 functions are flat in a physical sense, they include a multitude of variations in opacity and tone. Those variations are, in reality, hallmarks of Frankenthaler's operates and one particular of the excellent strengths of her style.

Frankenthaler's response to the difficulty of art's dual nature of fact and illusion sometimes consists of the unmistakable landscape components that she shares with Impressionism. Additional than the performs of other American Colour field painters, the functions of Frankenthaler are most likely to function horizontal patches of Colour clearly reminiscent of oceans, islands, horizons, skies and even cityscapes.

Frankenthaler's ties to the all-natural globe are a lot extra evident than these of other Colour filed painters. Suggestive titles such as Arcadia and Eden indicate her conscious indebtedness to landscape art. In addition, the ephemeral good quality of a lot of of Frankenthaler's pictures demonstrates her awareness of the fragility of each nature (the fact) and of artistic creativity (the illusion).

Kathleen Karlsen is a mother of 5 youngsters with a passionate interest in generating a globe exactly where young children and youth are cost-free to develop in imagination and joy. She has a lifelong interest in metaphysics, psychology, healing and the arts. She manages a multimedia organization with her husband Andrew in Bozeman, Montana.