April 10 – July 20, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 10, 5:30 – 7 pm
Bill Goldston, Director of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), will share his experience and insights working with artists at ULAE.
Public Lecture on Frankenthaler by London-based scholar Cora Chalaby:
Friday, April 25, 11 am
The exhibition features artwork bequeathed to the Museum by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; it also includes limited edition prints by artists from the Museum’s collection who worked with ULAE, a celebrated fine art print publisher that played an integral role in the American Print Renaissance.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), whose career spanned six decades, has long been recognized as a pioneer of abstract painting through her invention of the stain-soak technique thereby ushering in what is known as Color Field Painting. Despite her celebrated status as a painter, turning to printmaking in the early 1960s required a new way of thinking and working as an artist. “As the print evolves, it tells you, you tell it. You have a conversation with print,” she observed. This “conversation” included working collaboratively with master printmakers such as Tatyana Grosman and Bill Goldston at ULAE and other fine print establishments in North America and Europe to create and refine new approaches to abstraction and experimentation in print.
Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928, and raised in New York City. She attended the Dalton School, where she received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949 she graduated from Bennington College, Vermont, where she was a student of Paul Feeley. She later studied briefly with Hans Hofmann.
Frankenthaler’s professional exhibition career began in 1950, when Adolph Gottlieb selected her painting Beach (1950) for inclusion in the exhibition titled Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was presented in 1951, at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and that year she was also included in the landmark exhibition 9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture.
In 1952 Frankenthaler created Mountains and Sea, a breakthrough painting of American abstraction for which she poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor, working from all sides to create floating fields of translucent color. Mountains and Sea was immediately influential for the artists who formed the Color Field school of painting, notable among them Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
As early as 1959, Frankenthaler began to be a regular presence in major international exhibitions. She won first prize at the Premiere Biennale de Paris that year, and in 1966 she represented the United States in the 33rd Venice Biennale, alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski. She had her first major museum exhibition in 1960, at New York’s Jewish Museum, and her second, in 1969, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, followed by an international tour.
Frankenthaler experimented tirelessly throughout her long career. In addition to producing unique paintings on canvas and paper, she worked in a wide range of media, including ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and especially printmaking. Hers was a significant voice in the mid-century “print renaissance” among American abstract painters, and she is particularly renowned for her woodcuts. She continued working productively through the opening years of this century.
