$110,000
Estimate: $120,000 - $180,000
Auction: October 29, 2019 12:00:00 PM EDT
Signed bottom right, acrylic on paper.
Executed in 2002.
44 1/8 x 55 1/4 in. (112.1 x 140.3cm)
Provenance: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
Private Collection, Virginia Beach, Virginia (acquired directly from the above in 2008).
By family descent.
Private Collection, La Jolla, California.
EXHIBITED:
"Frankenthaler: Paintings on Paper (1949 - 2002)," Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida, February 14 - June 8, 2008; also traveled to The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, August 13 - October 26, 2003, checklist no. 71, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.
Throughout her career, Helen Frankenthaler blurred the boundaries of painting, drawing, and watercolor with her persistent experimentations in abstraction. She began her career in an Abstract Expressionist mode but quickly discovered her own unique style in pouring thinned pigments directly onto unprimed canvas laid out on the floor. The Color Field works that followed embodied an element of chance as well as a richness of color saturation that added a new facet to mid-century abstraction. Her influence on other artists in this direction, particularly Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, originated with her noteworthy Mountains and Sea painting of 1952 and her association with the critic Clement Greenberg. Her "soak-stain" technique effectively merged pigment and canvas, underscoring the flat physicality of the canvas and eliminating pictorial space, as Greenberg championed.
Although Frankenthaler challenged the traditional relationship of figure and ground, she did not completely do away with allusions to figuration, landscape, and nature. In Red Hot, 2002, the artist soaks paper with blood-red acrylic paint, later adding horizontal elements of deep oranges, purples, and reds in the center of the red field. Evoking a late summer sunset or a gash in the skin, the textured line bisects the picture plane and allows the viewer an enticing entry point. In the 1970s Frankenthaler famously stated that "paper is painting," and from 1992-2002 she painted exclusively on paper in her mature style.(1) Red Hot comes at the end of this prolific period where she employs the properties of paper itself as her medium.
1: The Artist as quoted in: Interview with Eleanor Munro (1979), as quoted in Robert S. Mattison, Helen Frankenthaler: Paper is Painting, exh. cat, London: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 2010, p. 9.