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拍品专文
“There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about”—Helen Frankenthaler
(H. Frankenthaler, from an interview at Tyler Graphics, Mount Kisco, New York, 11 July 1994, Sound Reel 11).
Hommage à Chardin is a consummate example of Helen Frankenthaler’s ground-breaking “soak-stain” technique. Pools of bright blue pigment coalesce across the surface of the canvas, so deep in places that they appear almost equally as vivid on the reverse of the painting. This method creates a wave of color that almost denies the possibility of a three dimensional composition, instead making the canvas and paint come together as one. Here, the thick saturation of color is contrasted with the raw, exposed untreated canvas upon which it sits and the neutral toned canvas, brightened only by the inundating blue, mimics the warm pallet of the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. The raw, unfettered composition seen here would come to dominate the rest of Frankenthaler’s career as she sought to seek out a new, distinctive way to unite pigment and canvas.
Frankenthaler’s works frequently appear non-representational, however they are often based on real or imaged landscapes and scenes. As in Hommage à Chardin, Frankenthaler incorporated the external world (in this case inspired by Chardin), the world of art, and her own internal world into every image she created. Here, the “soak-stain” technique and a building up of the thickness of paint results in a complex surface landscape, akin to the aged surface of a still life by the eponymous French painter.
During her active and expansive career, Frankenthaler’s artistic style transformed and flourished. Her maturation and development was a direct result of layering her artistic knowledge onto her past methodology, shifting from the post-painterly approach toward her Clement Greenberg-endorsed Color Field crusade. Born in New York City, Frankenthaler studied art at The Dalton School, the Art Students League, and later Bennington College in Vermont. Inspired by American Abstract Expressionists especially the work of Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler developed her own distinct approach including her experimentation with thinned paint and untreated canvas. The “soak-stain” technique of Frankenthaler’s post-painterly abstraction inspired a move away from gestural Abstract Expressionism to a second generation of the Color Field School of painting.
A prestigious artist throughout her career, art critic Barbara Rose pronounced her great admiration for the Frankenthaler’s particular gift for portraying the “freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but intimately tied to nature and human emotions” (B. Rose quoted in New York Times, 27 December 2011). Beautiful and powerful, with a dramatic and animated surface, Hommage à Chardin embodies a magical sense of impulsiveness and invites the viewer to lose themselves in its presence.
(H. Frankenthaler, from an interview at Tyler Graphics, Mount Kisco, New York, 11 July 1994, Sound Reel 11).
Hommage à Chardin is a consummate example of Helen Frankenthaler’s ground-breaking “soak-stain” technique. Pools of bright blue pigment coalesce across the surface of the canvas, so deep in places that they appear almost equally as vivid on the reverse of the painting. This method creates a wave of color that almost denies the possibility of a three dimensional composition, instead making the canvas and paint come together as one. Here, the thick saturation of color is contrasted with the raw, exposed untreated canvas upon which it sits and the neutral toned canvas, brightened only by the inundating blue, mimics the warm pallet of the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. The raw, unfettered composition seen here would come to dominate the rest of Frankenthaler’s career as she sought to seek out a new, distinctive way to unite pigment and canvas.
Frankenthaler’s works frequently appear non-representational, however they are often based on real or imaged landscapes and scenes. As in Hommage à Chardin, Frankenthaler incorporated the external world (in this case inspired by Chardin), the world of art, and her own internal world into every image she created. Here, the “soak-stain” technique and a building up of the thickness of paint results in a complex surface landscape, akin to the aged surface of a still life by the eponymous French painter.
During her active and expansive career, Frankenthaler’s artistic style transformed and flourished. Her maturation and development was a direct result of layering her artistic knowledge onto her past methodology, shifting from the post-painterly approach toward her Clement Greenberg-endorsed Color Field crusade. Born in New York City, Frankenthaler studied art at The Dalton School, the Art Students League, and later Bennington College in Vermont. Inspired by American Abstract Expressionists especially the work of Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler developed her own distinct approach including her experimentation with thinned paint and untreated canvas. The “soak-stain” technique of Frankenthaler’s post-painterly abstraction inspired a move away from gestural Abstract Expressionism to a second generation of the Color Field School of painting.
A prestigious artist throughout her career, art critic Barbara Rose pronounced her great admiration for the Frankenthaler’s particular gift for portraying the “freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but intimately tied to nature and human emotions” (B. Rose quoted in New York Times, 27 December 2011). Beautiful and powerful, with a dramatic and animated surface, Hommage à Chardin embodies a magical sense of impulsiveness and invites the viewer to lose themselves in its presence.