‘I feel today, and have always felt, that an idea need not be manifested across so many square meters of wall space. What matters are the proportions within the painting itself. There can be a great deal of space in a small painting. But sometimes the space one seeks demands a large surface. I have made small paintings as well as large ones.’
This work, created in 1964, exemplifies how a sense of vastness can unfold even within a limited pictorial field and, at the same time, demonstrates Helen Frankenthaler’s characteristic soak-stain technique. In this process, the artist poured thinned paint onto an unprimed canvas laid flat on the floor, allowing pools of color to form and soak into the fabric. Since 1962, Frankenthaler had been using diluted, water-based acrylic paints, which offered her far greater freedom of expression than the oil paints thinned with turpentine she had used previously.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011)
Untitled, 1964
Currently exhibited: Yes (Helen Frankenthaler moves Jenny Bronsinksi, Ina Gerken, Adrian Schiess)
Material: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 50 cm x 51 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_625
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Copyright: Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York
Keywords:
Acquired: Reinhard Ernst Collection, 2025
Helen Frankenthaler moves Jenny Brosinski, Ina Gerken, Adrian Schiess, 26.10.2025–22.02.2026
Brilliant hues – blue, rusty red, and yellow – interact across the surface, creating chromatic tension and depth. The color fields range from softly enclosing contours to droplet-like forms. A central dark-blue shape is bounded below by a red pool of paint and enclosed above by a yellow area, finding a pale-blue echo along the right edge of the canvas. Equally essential are the unpainted sections where the raw canvas remains visible. This apparent emptiness is a central compositional device. As Frankenthaler herself noted:
‘Oftentimes I leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted. This ‘negative’ space plays as active a role as the ‘positive,’ painted one. The negative spaces have their own shapes and are not empty.’
‘A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown’, in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956–1959, exh. cat. Guggenheim New York/Bilbao/Berlin, Ostfildern-Ruit 1998, pp. 29–49, here p. 46.
