Frankenthaler, Helen Mountains and Sea

"The Frankenthaler retrospective opens, appropriately enough, with the famous Mountains and Sea of 1952, a painting too beautiful, to use an old fashioned word, to regard merely as a historical moment in the march forward of the modernists, and too compelling, as beauty always is, to see only as a work that influenced some important artists to begin staining canvas. It is beyond question big with a future that would have been invisible when it was made, and so for us big with a past, momentous in the style wars of thirty something years ago. But it is worth the effort to try to see it as it must have been seen before the later history happened, as a cool composition of slender loops passing in and out of diaphanous washes of color pale greens and blues and pinks distantly Cubist but feminized, without the harsh angles, aggressive edges, and dangerous vertices. It is like a dance of seven veils." Arthur Danto

Helen Mounatins and Sea done by Frankenthaler is an extremely appealing pastel painting. It includes line, shape, form, and texture into one piece.

#Modern #Simplistic #ExpressionalArt