Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

One of the few women to gain fame as an Abstract Expressionist or Color-field artist, Helen Frankenthaler is recognized not only for her large color-stained canvases, but also for her skillfulness in translating her lyrical, painterly style into the printmaking medium. For this complex print, she used six woodblocks and hand-dyed paper pulp sprayed through stencils to create an illusion of fluidity, in which the colors swirl around a red dot with the exception of a single, yellow horizontal line. Although her works are non-representational, their allusion to landscapes, particularly under stormy weather conditions, has led to comparisons with the later work of the English Romantic artist J.M.W. Turner.