NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT.- The Yale University Art Gallery presents "Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts," on view through September 9, 2002. Helen Frankenthaler (born 1928) made her first woodcut in 1973, twenty-one years after making her art world debut with her enormously influential painting Mountains and Sea, in which she had stained the canvas rather than deposited paint on it, essentially fusing image and ground. It is no exaggeration to say that Frankenthaler’s turning to this oldest method of printmaking launched its resurgence in the last quarter of the 20th century. This exhibition, the ?rst to focus solely on her 23 woodcuts, also includes numerous states and proofs.
Frankenthaler made East and Beyond, her earliest woodcut, after considerable trial and error, using the jigsaw to create fluid shapes of different colors that fit together like pieces of a puzzle, repeating in the process what she had done in painting —she fused the image with its support. Savage Breeze, (1974), an equally serene and lyrical print, soon followed and by 1977 her woodcut method became increasingly complex, resulting in a more subtle fusion of color and wood. In 1983 Frankenthaler spent three weeks in Japan working with master carver Reizo Monjyu in the ancient tradition of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and produced the delicate Cedar Hill. Following a long hiatus, Frankenthaler collaborated with Garner Tullis in 1991 to produce The Clearing and Grove, smaller woodcuts that are more robust and forceful than her earlier work. In the next two years, Frankenthaler extended the technical possibilities of woodcut by using dyed paper pulp as the support. With the six prints constituting Tales of Genji of 1998, inspired by ukiyo-e prints and Murasaki Shikibu’s celebrated novel, and the monumental triptych Madame Butterfly (2000), the wood grain has again come to the fore.
Judith Goldman was the guest curator of the exhibition at the Naples Museum of Art, Florida, the organizing institution, and is the author of the accompanying catalogue. Suzanne Boorsch, curator of prints, drawings and photographs, organized the showing at Yale, where it is supported by the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.
