In Pursuit of Beauty: 1990s
By the 1990s Helen Frankenthaler approached the act of painting two ways. Both might begin spontaneously but resolve differently. One might begin and end in a single session, with only minor additions—the breakthrough initiated decades earlier by Mountains and Sea (1952). The other mode—what she called the “redeemed picture”—bore a more “worked-into or scrubbed surface, often darker, more dense.” The desired result, regardless of approach, was, in her words, a “beautiful picture” that looked like it had been “born at once, regardless of how many hours, or weeks, or years it took to make it.”
Janus (1990) and Yin Yang (1990) commune like brother and sister. Sites for the confluence of opposites, both paintings share tinted grounds, layered surfaces, and transparent vectors. Some passages, rimmed with crackling trails of fire or splattered with a spew of black dots, feel like thresholds to other galaxies.
The Rake’s Progress (1991) and Fantasy Garden (1992) display a dense physicality, because the painter was experimenting with gel medium mixed with acrylic and manipulated with rakes, masonry trowels, spatulas, sponges, and wooden spoons. The agitated surfaces of Borrowed Dream (1992) and Maelstrom (1992)—tough, edgy, recalcitrant—raise existential questions about the artist’s late work.