Caffein

“One prepares, bringing all one’s weight and gracefulness and knowledge to bear: spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, physically. And often there’s a moment when all frequencies are right and it hits.” - Helen Frankenthaler
A ruddy bloom of thick red and dark orange brushstrokes thrums from center and up beyond the painting’s boundary, surrounded by misty clouds of yellow and pink. The raw canvas ground, tan and peach, contains an elegantly tangled composition. While the stark division of space focuses the painter’s activity and the viewer’s gaze on the dynamic red passages, smaller dabs and streaks of fuchsia, ochre and maroon bracket the drama, creating a sense of both organization and scale. The effect is reminiscent of Claude Monet’s famed series depicting the Houses of Parliament in London, wherein the fuzzy silhouettes of little boats sometimes dot the River Thames in the foreground and beyond, making the distant shadow of the Houses feel that much more colossal.
Caffein, 1975, is exemplary of Helen Frankenthaler’s work in the decade—lyrical, vivid and bold. In 1969, the artist was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, in 1970, she closed her 83rd Street studio after a decade working there, and in 1971 she divorced from Robert Motherwell after thirteen years of marriage. Her professional successes combined with these emotional events to produce a body of work in the early and mid-1970s that is noticeably more intense and expressive in nature. Barbara Rose, who wrote a monograph on Frankenthaler in 1972, noted about her work in this period, “Her paintings are not merely beautiful. They are statements of great intensity and significance about what it is to stay alive, to face crisis and survive, to accept maturity with grace and even joy" (B. Rose, Frankenthaler, New York, 1972, pp. 105-106). By harnessing the fluid nature of her trademark thinned paint and combining it with a newfound interest in painterly strokes, the artist could produce decisively momentous compositions that both furthered her career and the world’s understanding of American postwar art.
Frankenthaler is widely considered the originator of the Color Field movement in Abstract Expressionism. Her breakthrough came in 1952 with the painting Mountains and Sea, the first of her works executed in highly diluted paint on raw canvas. The technique required a delicate negotiation between planning and spontaneity, and an embrace of unexpected consequences. Painting on the floor, Frankenthaler would pour pools of water and pigment to soak into the weave of the unprimed canvas. This literal fusion of paint and its support marked a radical departure from the ethos of Frankenthaler’s peers in Abstract Expressionism, notably Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose work largely depended on the physicality of paint, lavished in thick impasto, in dramatic opposition to its support.
“She gained what watercolorists had always had—freedom to make her gesture live on the canvas with stunning directness” (E. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, New York, 2000, p. 218). Allowing her works to exist as layered fields of diaphanous pigment, Frankenthaler brought attention to the objective painting as well as the visual qualities of depth and body. This break from Abstract Expressionism was endorsed by the preeminent critic of the day, Clement Greenberg, when he coined the term Post-Painterly Abstraction in the 1960s to describe the merging of paint and canvas so exemplified by Frankenthaler and like-minded artists.

"A true work of art grows on you. It communicates order and truth.… Great art is a manifestation of that magic, that indescribable thing that is the gift. It had to be created. That’s part of the gift, and the strong will of art. The making of art starts with chaos and is resolved into order, which can make it beautiful." — Helen Frankenthaler