„Move and Make“ / Museum Reinhard Ernst / Hirmer Verlag /
„Openness
‘Relevant again’ is a phrase often heard when works of art from the
past are declared to be important for the present. Often it is the content
that is considered relevant: war, suffering, revolution, psychological
stress or uprising. The content could also be related to the artist’s biog-
raphy: individual attitudes, tragic fates or struggles for emancipation
might be reflected in current events. But when there is no content, as in
abstract painting, then it becomes more difficult. After all, it is a fun-
damental tenet of art history that styles, brushwork and forms corre-
spond to their epochs. From a purely aesthetic perspective, it would
never occur to anyone to place a work by Van Gogh or a Cubist painting
in the twenty-first century. Formally speaking, Wassily Kandinsky and
Jackson Pollock are also very much of their time. With all due respect for
their powers of innovation and artistic achievements, hardly a young
artist today would adopt their aesthetic language to create contempo-
rary art.
But there are exceptions, and Helen Frankenthaler is one of them. Her
works and her visual world are not ‘relevant again’ – they are still rele-
vant. An essential reason is the inexplicability and openness, not just of
specific works, but especially of her painterly approach as a whole. Her
path is still relevant today – for many subsequent generations up to
the present, not only abstract but also figurative, not only in the studio
but also illegally on the street. Examples will follow later.
When stories are not fully told, there are several ways to interpret this
state of affairs. On the one hand, it could be attributed to weakness
or inferior quality, to lack of consistency, superficiality or an incapacity
for reflection. But the situation is different when it comes to an ‘open
work’. The term was coined by Umberto Eco, for whom it especially in-
cluded an open, variable mode of reception and an ‘active recipient
participating in the process of constituting meaning’.1 Such works do not
necessarily have to be recognisable in their aesthetic structure as ‘works
in progress’; self-contained pieces can also trigger this open process
of reception. For Eco, examples included the mobiles of Alexander Calder
and the painting of Art Informel.2
Another, rarer variant of this narrative incompleteness arises when an
artistic position marks a new path within an oeuvre as a whole, offering
so much potential and so many possibilities for development that it
provides points of reference for many future generations and can be ab-
sorbed into subsequent zeitgeists. Here, openness refers not only to
reception or to a single work, but to a practical method, a visual, paint-
erly approach and the potential it holds for many decades to come.
Such is the case with Helen Frankenthaler. Her painting style is not ex-
hausted; her entire path resembles an open work.
Postwar Ghosts
The openness of Helen Frankenthaler’s pictorial language is strongly root-
ed in fluidity. The watery, the floating, the colour that spreads and
drifts, the image that looks as if it had painted itself, without human or
art-historical guidance or even brushstrokes. Frankenthaler thus differs aesthetically from many of her contemporaries. A more detailed exami-
nation of her work will follow in the next section, but in order to
understand her unique position, we should first consider some contrast-
ing but common approaches to abstraction among her colleagues in
the postwar period.“
In the following, I will discuss Frankenthaler’s colleagues, show how she differs from them and why she continues to inspire so many young artists to this day. For example, Robert Nava, Jenny Brosinski or Saeio.
The complete essay can be found here in the catalog:
https://shop.museum-re.de/de/shopartikel/buecher/helen-frankenthaler-katalog
https://www.hirmerverlag.de/us/titel-55-55/helen_frankenthaler-2711/
Larissa Kikol 