Helen FrankenthalerHelen Frankenthaler What Red Lines Can Do Series, Screen Print1970

“Untitled” lithograph from Frakenthaler’s What Red Lines Can Do Series. Signed and dated, with the numbers 55/9/75 on the lower front right. Color screen print on white arches handmade cold press paper.

Helen Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928 in New York City, the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge and a family of Jewish immigrants from Germany who emphasized culture and intellectual pursuits and continue to be active to this day such as through nephew, the artist and photographer Clifford Ross. Frankenthaler studied at the Dalton School in New York under the muralist Rufino Tamayo and later at Bennington College in Vermont under the artist Paul Feeley. She continued her private studies with Wallace Harrison and Hans Hofmann. Helen Frankenthaler became active in the New York School of the 1950s, influenced by artists like Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. After a five-year relationship with the critic Clement Greenberg she married fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell in 1958 until their divorce in 1971.

Frankenthaler was an influential member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, impacting the transition of the school toward the Color Field style. She received praise for her 1952 painting Mountain and Sea, which she painted by pouring thinned paint onto untreated canvases. This technique would come to be called “soak-stain” and would be one of many experimentations she would apply to her work in ceramics, sculpture, and printmaking. In addition the related medium that most attracted her, and in which her achievement came the closest painting, was printmaking—especially the creation of woodcuts, hers counting among the greatest of contemporary works in that medium.

Frankenthaler has been exhibited in the storied 1951 Ninth Street Show in New York as well as in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Other exhibitions and collections have included the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney. Frankenthaler co-represented the United States at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966 and received the National Medal of the Arts in 2001. She passed away in 2011.

This piece is signed and dated by the Artist.