Helen Frankenthaler Prints and Multiples

While Helen Frankenthaler remains best known for bold, expressive “soak-stain” paintings such as Mountains and Sea (1952), she has been recognized for her innovative prints, too. The Abstract Expressionist artist worked across diverse media for decades, with forays into woodcutting, drawing and printmaking that also pushed boundaries. 

In the early 1950s, when Frankenthaler first poured turpentine-thinned paint onto raw canvas, the lifelong New Yorker blazed a trail that many of her male contemporaries would follow. Her process, which came to be known as Color Field painting, was described as “the bridge between Pollock and what is possible” by the artist Morris Louis, an early adopter of the technique. But Frankenthaler also experimented widely with printmaking. 

Off White Square, a highlight of “As in Nature,” a 2017 solo exhibition of Frankenthaler’s works at Clark Art Institute, in Massachusetts, is a dramatic picture from 1973 that’s more than 21 feet long. The smallest print in “No Rules” — a series that brings together 17 of the roughly 25 woodcut prints that the artist executed between 1973 and 2009 — measures 20 by 24 inches. 

This pair of works reveals Frankenthaler’s innate gift for handling different scales, making paintings and works on paper that are compelling whether they are super-sized or intimate. In some ways, this was the magic ingredient in the work of this artist, who was one of the few women to garner the critical acclaim given to such male Ab-Ex counterparts as Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell.

In the 1970s, Tatyana Grosman, of Universal Limited Art Editions, invited Frankenthaler, then in her mid-40s, to make her first woodcut. The artist approached the time-consuming process unconventionally. Her mantra became “Ignore the rules.”

Rethinking the properties of wood, paper and even the inks, Frankenthaler introduced qualities of transparency that were new to the printmaking medium. Her colors became diaphanous layers. The six prints that comprise “Tales of Genji” (1998) and “Madame Butterfly” (2000) are remarkable examples of this feat.

Early on, Frankenthaler did not carve into the wood. Instead, she applied ink to the ends of multiple blocks. Because she did not want negative spaces to appear between her colors, each individual element was printed separately rather than being joined to the others in a jigsaw-like configuration. The artist also incorporated the wood grain as a formal quality, enlivening its natural character by roughing it up a bit with all sorts of scrapers, including sandpaper, dental tools and even a cheese scraper.

Eventually, Frankenthaler began making her own unique paper pulp for her prints. As for her colors, when she was unhappy with the tones of a few in early test prints, she began laying down a layer of white ink to enliven the pigments that would be applied next.

Frankenthaler made four woodcuts during the 1970s and just two more during the ’80s. The resulting oeuvre was worth the wait. Referencing Japan and Japanese woodblock prints, which grew out of 17th-century developments in printing and book publishing, Frankenthaler called her first woodcut East and Beyond. By the time she made her last woodcut, in 2009, she’d created off-kilter compositions, astonishing color arrangements and meandering lines evocative of her paintings.

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