Helen Frankenthaler

Acquired: Reinhard Ernst Collection, 2018

Helen Frankenthaler moves Jenny Brosinski, Ina Gerken, Adrian Schiess, 26.10.2025–22.02.2026

When Helen Frankenthaler first encountered Pollock’s work in the 1950s, she was fascinated by the expansive sensation it conveyed — as if, in her words, the paintings ‘had no edges, as if he could go on and on with this ordered dance, paint until the painting demanded that he stop’. Yet what she recognised in Pollock’s process was a new way to dissolve the opposition between colour and line, allowing the two to merge in unexpected ways.
Still, Frankenthaler consciously distanced herself from Pollock’s method: ‘I was never, to use Harold Rosenberg’s term, an “action painter”’ she explained in a 1997 interview with Julia Brown. “I did not want to demonstrate strong gesture or brush-stroke. (…) I have always been concerned with painting that simultane¬ously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.’
Frankenthaler never adopted Pollock’s gestural style literally — for her, dripping was ‘a boring accident’. Yet she did see in it the potential to rethink the relationship between colour and line. Fallen Angel picks up on this idea, but in Frankenthaler’s own distinct visual language. Her openness towards format and orientation is evident when viewing the reverse of the canvas: the painting was later rotated 180 degrees. In this way, Fallen Angel unites drama and chromatic intensity with a striking artistic freedom in form and composition.

‘A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown’, in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956–1959, exh. cat. Guggenheim New York/Bilbao/Berlin, Ostfildern-Ruit, pp. 29–49, here p. 45.
‘His drips, even though they’re on the floor, he wanted the drips. I think a number of reasons [sic]. One is it’s a kind of boring accident to me, a drip. There are many accidents that are very rich that you use, but if you exploit a drip it’s very boring and familiar to begin with. Drips are drips.’ Oral history interview with Helen Frankenthaler by Barbara Rose, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_212046 (accessed: 21th October 2025).