"The Clearing"

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(1991)

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"The Clearing" 1991, woodcut printed in colors on handmade Tullis paper, 16" x 21" (sheet 24" x 32") signed in pencil, dated and numbered.  Published and printed by Garner Tullis Workshop, New York, with full margins. A very good impression [Harrison 218].

Helen Frankenthaler (1928- ) was born in New York, the daughter of a State Supreme Court Justice. She grew up in Manhattan, where she attended private schools, including the Dalton School, where Rufino Tamayo introduced her to oil painting.  From 1945 to 1949 she attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied with the Cubist painter Paul Feeley.  She also studied with Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League and began graduate work at Columbia before leaving the university to begin her life in art in a studio in lower Manhattan.  There Clement Greenberg, the eminent art critic, introduced Frankenthaler to Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann.

Frankenthaler is part of the second generation of the New York Abstract Expressionists that include Larry Rivers, Sam Francis, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg and Jim Dine. She was the youngest artist whose work was included in the Ninth Street Show in 1951, the year of her first solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Frankenthaler began working in lithography, etching and aquatint at U.L.A.E. in Islip, Long Island, in 1961.  Despite her initial reticence, lithography captured Frankenthaler's imagination gauging the capabilities and limitations of the process. Frankenthaler understood the capabilities of the medium for color. She worked each stone in momentary gestures, each calculated and deliberate striving to preserve the sense of effortlessness.  She mixed her own colors, supervised the registration of inks and selected paper, making certain that the creative process was hers alone. Like Nijinsky, Frankenthaler also understood the expressive potential of the area between two bodies or forms, what painters sometimes call 'negative space', where the space between figures become a firm body of air, a lucid statement of relationship.

"The Clearing" is float-mounted in a large 36 1/4" x 44 1/2" wide half-round dark chocolate contemporary frame with brown grain showing through. The heavily textured tan outer linen, middle fine textured grappa linen and inner pearl white rag mats are acid and lignin free and protected with Acrylite-AR OP3 (UV) by CYRO ..... $5,500.00