"Thanksgiving Day", Signed by the Artist

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Helen Frankenthaler
"Thanksgiving Day", Signed by the Artist
1973

About the Item

This ethereal ceramic tile, stoneware with glazes, "Thanksgiving Day", is a rare and exemplary piece of the Abstract Expressionist artist, Helen Frankenthaler. On the eponymous holiday weekend in 1973, Frankenthaler uniquely painted 71 ceramic tiles. This one is number 61 in that series of 71. These tiles were exhibited at the Guggenheim in 1975. Helen Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928 in New York City, the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge and a family of Jewish immigrants from Germany who emphasized culture and intellectual pursuits and continue to be active to this day such as through nephew, the artist and photographer Clifford Ross. Frankenthaler studied at the Dalton School in New York under the muralist Rufino Tamayo and later at Bennington College in Vermont under the artist Paul Feeley. She continued her private studies with Wallace Harrison and Hans Hofmann. Helen Frankenthaler became active in the New York School of the 1950s, influenced by artists like Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. After a five-year relationship with the critic Clement Greenberg she married fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell in 1958 until their divorce in 1971. Frankenthaler was an influential member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, impacting the transition of the school toward the Color Field style. She received praise for her 1952 painting Mountain and Sea, which she painted by pouring thinned paint onto untreated canvases. This technique would come to be called “soak-stain” and would be one of many experimentations she would apply to her work in ceramics, sculpture, and printmaking. In addition the related medium that most attracted her, and in which her achievement came the closest painting, was printmaking—especially the creation of woodcuts, hers counting among the greatest of contemporary works in that medium. Frankenthaler has been exhibited in the storied 1951 Ninth Street Show in New York as well as in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Other exhibitions and collections have included the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney. Frankenthaler co-represented the United States at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966 and received the National Medal of the Arts in 2001. She passed away in 2011.

Creator:
Helen Frankenthaler (1928, American)
Creation Year:
1973
Dimensions:
Height: 13.5 in (34.29 cm)Width: 17.5 in (44.45 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
Medium:
Ceramic,Stoneware,Oil
Movement & Style:
Abstract Expressionist
Period:
1970-1979
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Detroit, MI
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU128616964802

Shop All Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

Prolific and pioneering painter Helen Frankenthaler said it was “a combination of impatience, laziness and innovation” that drove her to thin her paints with turpentine so that they would seep into the fabric of an unprimed canvas. Her breakthrough in the early 1950s led the way for a spellbinding new style of painting that would come to be known as Color Field.

Although Color Field is often considered a strain of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler’s work differed from the gestural “Action Painting” that typified the paintings of artists like Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner. Her vast and immersive expanses of color created at a fearless scale captivated art critics and greatly influenced her peers including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.

Frankenthaler knew from an early age that she wanted to be a painter. The youngest daughter of a New York State Supreme Court justice, she grew up on Manhattan’s Park Avenue and as a child delighted in the little ways color and form revealed themselves, whether dribbling red nail polish in a sink full of water or drawing her steps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to her family’s apartment. As a student at Bennington College, her rare vision was enriched by the mentorship of painter Paul Feeley, who gave her lessons in Cubism. After dabbling in art history at Columbia University, she rented a studio downtown and befriended rising New York art stars like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, whom she later married.

Characterized by “direct, exuberant gestures,” the Abstract Expressionist technique was all about gusto, and Frankenthaler had it in spades. One of the few women of this era to garner widespread critical acclaim, Frankenthaler had a significant impact on the mid-20th-century art world. She exhibited in the high-profile 1951 Ninth Street Show and, in 1957, she appeared in a Life magazine spread on women artists photographed by Gordon Parks. In 1960, the Jewish Museum held her first major museum show, a retrospective of her 1950s work. A 1969 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art further introduced Frankenthaler to the broader art world.

While Frankenthaler remains best known for bold, expressive “soak-stain” paintings such as Mountains and Sea (1952), she worked across diverse media for decades, with forays into woodcutting, drawing and printmaking that also pushed boundaries. She also taught at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, fostering generations of artists. She died in 2011.

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