BASEL.- With over fifty works from six decades, the special exhibition Helen Frankenthaler at the Kunstmuseum Basel offers extensive insight into the expansive oeuvre of a preeminent figure of American abstraction. Frankenthaler’s intensely colorful paintings, typically in large formats, light up the galleries and engage viewers. This comprehensive in-depth- survey is the largest exhibition of her work in Europe to date and her first institutional solo show in Switzerland.

A pioneering representative of Abstract Expressionism, Helen Frankenthaler (1928– 2011) occupies a central position in postwar American art. Her soak-stain technique revolutionized abstract painting and catalyzed the development of Color Field painting in the U.S. from the mid-1950s onward. A particular focus of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel is on her probing engagement with historic art she admired, which inspired many works throughout her career. For the first time, Frankenthaler’s paintings will be shown in conversation with artworks ranging from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, a juxtaposition that enriches our understanding of her abstract art.

At the young age of twenty-three, Frankenthaler changed the course of modern painting when she came up with her innovative soak-stain technique: applying diluted paint to unprimed canvases she laid out on the floor, she created luminous compositions of — often monumental in size. She manipulated the paint from all sides, using sponges, scrapers, household brushes, and other tools. As a result, the canvas absorbed the pigments, yielding distinctive effects: fabric and color became one. Although Frankenthaler left plenty of room in her process for chance, she retained a finely honed sense of balance and structure. Her works have captivated viewers for decades through her lyrical handling of color and bold compositional choices.

In 2024, the Kunstmuseum welcomed Frankenthaler’s formidable painting Riverhead (1963) to its collection. A generous gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the work filled a significant gap in the museum’s holdings of American art. The accession also prompted the museum to make plans for this major exhibition.

Biographical background and influences

The daughter of an educated and affluent Jewish family, Frankenthaler was raised in New York. She was encouraged early on to believe in herself and pursue her intention to become an artist. She trained as a painter at the progressive Bennington College in Vermont, USA. As a student, she tried her hand at Cubist composition and learned to subject pictures to painstaking analysis. As she strove to develop her own abstract practice, she found vital inspiration in Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Joan Miró, but also in younger artists including Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning.

By her early twenties, Frankenthaler had struck out on her own in a studio in Manhattan. She soon made the acquaintances of the influential art critic Clement Greenberg and members of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist artists including Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and her later husband Robert Motherwell. The encounter with Pollock and his treatment of the horizontal canvas, in particular, made a profound impression on Frankenthaler and spurred her to develop her revolutionary soak-stain technique.

In 1951, work by Frankenthaler was on view in the seminal group exhibition 9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture in New York, and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York mounted the artist’s first solo show. From this point on, she regularly presented work in group and solo exhibitions—first in the U.S., then, from 1959 on, also abroad. The retrospectives at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1960 and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1969 were particular highlights; the latter presentation subsequently toured in Europe. The first monographic study of her oeuvre, by art historian John Elderfield, came out in 1989, the year a retrospective of her paintings opened at the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, Texas.

In the 1990s, Frankenthaler gradually relocated the center of her life and work from New York City to the Connecticut shore, first to Shippan Point, Stamford, and later to Contentment Island, Darien. During this time, she worked primarily on paper and continued to show her work at major institutions. At age eighty-three, she died in Darien, CT, in 2011.

Frankenthaler continually developed and refined her painterly practice throughout her career, but she also kept returning to the soak-stain technique. In addition to creating singular paintings on canvas and paper, she also worked in other media; her fine art prints, in particular, have won acclaim.

Helen Frankenthaler at the Kunstmuseum Basel is made possible by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, which provided a generous loan of 37 works by the artist. Additional works come from the holdings of European and American museums and private collections including the ASOM Collection, Vaduz; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the MAMCO Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; the Merzbacher Kunststiftung, Zurich; the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; the mumok, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; the Museum Reinhard Ernst, Wiesbaden; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. An audio guide produced by soundgarden audioguidance GmbH leads visitors through the exhibition. The scenography was realized by Groenlandbasel.