News / Helen Frankenthaler / Museum Exhibitions

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Helen Frankenthaler in
The Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting

December 18, 2019–August 2, 2020
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
www.guggenheim.org

In the 1960s a group of avant-garde painters began to push abstraction in new directions, their attempts leading to the emergence of several divergent styles. Works in this presentation chart several of the varied and complex courses nonrepresentational art followed in the 1960s and into the 1970s. This exhibition reflects the museum’s historical engagement with this artistic period. Work by Helen Frankenthaler is included.

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Contemporary Art
Five Propositions

October 26, 2019–May 4, 2020
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
www.mfa.org

Through five thematic groupings, this exhibition seeks to rethink the stories that can be told with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s collection of contemporary art. The groupings address a range of topics, including artistic process and complex relationships between humans and the natural world, the body, materials, identity, and notions of utopia. Work by Georg Baselitz, Helen Frankenthaler, and Andy Warhol is included.

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Artist’s Choice
Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape

October 21, 2019–April 12, 2020
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org

In The Shape of Shape, Amy Sillman—an artist who has helped redefine contemporary painting, pushing the medium into drawing, installations, video, and zines—has created a revelatory Artist’s Choice installation drawn from the museum’s collection. The exhibition features works, many rarely seen, spanning vastly different time periods, places, and mediums. Work by Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Howard Hodgkin, Henry Moore, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool is included.

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Frankenthaler on Paper

January 17–March 29, 2020
Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
www.arthurrossgallery.org

Helen Frankenthaler played a seminal role in both Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. This exhibition presents ten unique paintings on paper and fourteen prints that date from the 1970s to the 1990s. These rarely seen paintings on paper reflect Frankenthaler’s painterly process and were considered by the artist to be equal to her large-scale paintings.

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Epic Abstraction
Pollock to Herrera

December 17, 2018–February 4, 2020
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
www.metmuseum.org

Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera explores large-scale abstract painting, sculpture, and assemblage, from the 1940s to the twenty-first century, through works from the Met collection and special loans. Many of the artists in the exhibition worked in large formats not only to explore aesthetic elements of line, color, shape, and texture, but also to activate scale’s metaphoric potential to evoke expansive—“epic”—ideas and subjects, including time, history, nature, and existential concerns of the self. Work by Helen Frankenthaler and Cy Twombly is included.

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Helen Frankenthaler in
Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show

October 6, 2019–January 26, 2020
Katonah Museum of Art, New York
www.katonahmuseum.org

Sparkling Amazons presents the often-overlooked contribution by women artists to the Abstract Expressionist movement and the significant role they played as bold innovators within the New York School during the 1940s and ’50s. Through the presentation of some thirty works of art alongside documentary photography, the exhibition captures an important moment in the history of Abstract Expressionism. Work by Helen Frankenthaler is included.

June 29–December 30, 2019
Bennington Museum, Vermont
benningtonmuseum.org

During the 1960s, Bennington College served as a rural epicenter for a group of artists who were pushing the possibilities of abstraction in pared-down, color-based works that have come to be known collectively as Color Field painting. This exhibition looks at this critical moment when these artists led the way in American art, and expands our understanding of the variety of formal, material, and conceptual approaches that artists took to painting and related color-based sculpture. Work by Helen Frankenthaler is included.

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Pittura/Panorama
Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1992

May 7–November 17, 2019
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice
polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it

Curated by John Elderfield, Pittura/Panorama features fourteen paintings covering a forty-year span of Helen Frankenthaler’s career. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s development of the pittura (painting) and the panorama: the interplay between works like easel paintings, although made on the floor, and large, horizontal paintings that open onto shallow but expansive spaces, in the way that panoramas do. This exhibition is organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and Venetian Heritage, in association with Gagosian.

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Abstract Climates
Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown

August 4–October 27, 2019
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
parrishart.org

In 1950, at the encouragement of art critic Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler studied briefly in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Hans Hofmann. Following her marriage to Robert Motherwell in 1958, she spent more than a decade of summers living and working there. Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown presents key examples of Frankenthaler’s work, beginning with those made the first summer the artist spent at Hofmann’s studio school and going on to focus on the period from the late 1950s through 1969. It also features photographs, letters, and memorabilia that shed light on the artist’s process, with an emphasis on the meaning of the place and its impact on her development as a painter. This exhibition has traveled from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Massachusetts.

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Helen Frankenthaler Prints
Seven Types of Ambiguity

June 29–October 20, 2019
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
artmuseum.princeton.edu

This exhibition celebrates the gift of ten prints and five related proofs from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation to the Princeton University Art Museum. Spanning five decades and more than a dozen distinct technical processes, these works represent the generative role of printmaking in Helen Frankenthaler’s oeuvre. Approximately fifty exhibited works explore Frankenthaler’s compositional language, working process, collaborations, evocations of place, and historical referents, revealing the vitality of the artist’s work in prints throughout her career.

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Helen Frankenthaler in
Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s

March 29–August 18, 2019
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org

This exhibition gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold and saturated color to activate perception. During this period, many artists adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Work by Helen Frankenthaler is included.

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Helen Frankenthaler
Woodcuts: Prints and Proofs

February 8–April 21, 2019
Kode Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Norway
kodebergen.no

This large-scale exhibition displays twenty-three of Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcuts ranging from her earliest, made in 1973, to her last, made in 2009, along with proofs and paintings on wood used in the making of several of the editions. This is the artist’s first solo show in Norway and the most comprehensive presentation of her woodcuts in Europe to date.

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Peindre la nuit

October 13, 2018–April 15, 2019
Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
www.centrepompidou-metz.fr

This exhibition explores the night in modern and contemporary painting, music, literature, photography, and video. With a focus on the perception of night rather than its iconography, the exhibition intends to be a nocturnal experience. Work by Harold Ancart, Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and Ed Ruscha is included. 

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Helen Frankenthaler Prints
The Romance of a New Medium

April 20–September 3, 2018
Art Institute of Chicago
www.artic.edu

For nearly two decades Helen Frankenthaler produced prints at the Universal Limited Art Editions workshop. This exhibition presents more than fifty prints of Frankenthaler’s ULAE productions along with rare and important loans, including proofs from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation that illustrate the artist’s working methods and explore the evolution of an image from initial idea to final published edition.

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Abstract Climates
Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown

July 6–September 2, 2018
Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Massachusetts
www.paam.org

In 1950, at the encouragement of art critic Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler studied briefly in Provincetown with Hans Hofmann. Following her marriage to Robert Motherwell in 1958, she spent more than a decade of summers living and working there. Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown will present key examples of Frankenthaler’s work, beginning with those made in that first summer at Hofmann’s studio school, and going on to focus on the period from the late 1950s through 1969. It will also feature photographs, letters, and memorabilia that shed light on the artist’s process, with an emphasis on the meaning of the place and its impact on her development as a painter.

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Helen Frankenthaler in
The Water Lilies: American Abstract Art and the Last Monet

April 13–August 20, 2018
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
www.musee-orangerie.fr

In 1955, Alfred H. Barr Jr. brought one of Claude Monet’s large panels of Water Lilies into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At that time, Monet’s work was presented as “a bridge between the naturalism of early Impressionism and the highly developed school of abstract art” in New York. This exhibition focuses on the precise moment when these paintings were rediscovered and the New York School was first being recognized. Included are a selection of some of Monet’s later works and some twenty major paintings by American artists. Work by Helen Frankenthaler is included.

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As in Nature
Helen Frankenthaler Paintings

July 1–October 9, 2017
The Clark, Williamstown, Massachusetts
www.clarkart.edu

As in Nature comprises a selection of large paintings by Helen Frankenthaler from the 1950s through the 1990s, focusing on nature as a long-standing inspiration. This exhibition reveals the full range of styles and techniques that Frankenthaler explored and focuses on the complex meanings behind the color in her paintings.

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No Rules
Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts

July 1–September 24, 2017
The Clark, Williamstown, Massachusetts
www.clarkart.edu

No Rules explores Helen Frankenthaler’s inventive and groundbreaking approach to the woodcut, a medium she explored for over four decades. She began creating woodcuts after experimenting with lithography, etching, and screen-printing and worked with a variety of print publishers to push the medium in new directions.

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Helen Frankenthaler in
Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction

April 15–August 13, 2017
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org

In the postwar era, societal shifts made it possible for larger numbers of women to work professionally as artists, yet few support networks existed for them. Drawn from the museum’s collection, the exhibition features more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, textiles, and ceramics by some fifty women artists, including Helen Frankenthaler.

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Matisse and American Art

February 5–June 18, 2017
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
www.montclairartmuseum.org

Curated by Gail Stavitsky, this exhibition focuses on the French master’s profound impact on the development of American modern art from 1907 to the present. Nineteen works by Matisse are juxtaposed with forty-four works by American artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann.

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The American Dream
Pop to the Present

March 9–June 18, 2017
British Museum, London
americandreamexhibition.org

This exhibition traces the past six decades of American history through prints of unprecedented scale and ambition. Starting with the explosion of Pop art in the 1960s, the show includes works by many of America’s most celebrated artists. Works by Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann are on view.

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The Beginning of Everything
Drawings from the Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney Collections

February 24–June 18, 2017
The Menil Collection, Houston
www.menil.org

In anticipation of the October 2017 opening of the Menil Drawing Institute, the museum is exhibiting a selection of drawings spanning the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The show highlights promised gifts from the collections of Janie C. Lee and Louisa Stude Sarofim, as well as works from David Whitney’s 2005 bequest, which include those by Balthus, Georg Baselitz, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Giacometti, Anselm Kiefer, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Rachel Whiteread.

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Helen Frankenthaler in
Women of Abstract Expressionism

February 18–May 28, 2017
Palm Springs Art Museum, California
www.psmuseum.org

This exhibition presents the work of twelve American women artists active in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1940s and 1950s. As part of a circle of painters known as Abstract Expressionists, these women helped forge the first fully American modern art movement.

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The Great Graphic Boom

March 3–May 28, 2017
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo
www.nasjonalmuseet.no

This exhibition explores the intense interest in graphic art among many leading artists of the postwar art period. With works from twenty-five artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol, the show highlights the use of graphic media both as a refined form of expression and as an important phase in the artistic process. The exhibition has been organized with support from Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany.