NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian Gallery announces the publication of "The heroine Paint": After Frankenthaler, edited by Katy Siegel. Taking Helen Frankenthaler's 1950s New York debut as its starting point, "The heroine Paint": After Frankenthaler follows the artist's painting and expands its focus to include the immediate social and artistic context of her work, then traces artistic currents as they move outward in different directions in the ensuing decades. The book collects six scholarly essays, six short texts from contemporary artists, and reprints of historical writing, interweaving these voices with a visual chronology that gives historical context by highlighting key works from performances, publications, and cultural ephemera from the 1950s to today.
Beginning with the second generation of the New York School, readers are introduced to artists, as well as writers, who created work that embraced decoration, play, and the everyday, challenging the narrow historical image of formalist art. The book traces these various phenomena as they unfurl over the next fifty years: through Color Field painting and the relation of allover painting to domestic architecture in the 1960s; feminist art in the 1970s, with an emphasis on craft, ambitious scale, and performance; and the staining and pouring of paint on raw canvas, along with its sexual, bodily, and psychological implications for both male artists and a new generation of feminists in the 1980s and 90s. These various threads come back together in the present moment, when artists find permission, rather than prohibition, in a material abstraction that fluidly embraces decoration, "minor" genres, sexuality, and pleasure.
"The heroine Paint": After Frankenthaler offers a wealth of historical information as it grounds and is shaped by the perspective of the present. Thus it promises to be an important resource for young artists, as well as critics, curators, and historians of modern and contemporary art. The wealth of archival imagery from cultural as well as artistic sources, and the elegance of the writing promise to make the book accessible and compelling as well to a general art audience.
Katy Siegel is an art historian based in New York. As Curator-At-Large for the Rose Art Museum, her recent exhibition "Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler" serves as a companion to "The heroine Paint." In fall 2015 she will join the faculty of Stony Brook University as the inaugural Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. One of the foremost colorists of our time, she produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound.
