Displaying items by tag: Helen Frankenthaler

A single act of generosity by a collector and supporter of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City has resulted in the gifting of five more works of art, a handful of loans, and an installation celebrating Color Field painting. Luther W. Brady, M.D., one of the world’s foremost oncologists, gifted the museum with Jules Olitski’s Embraced: Yellow and Black, in the memory of his dear friend Joanne Lyon, a longtime supporter of the Nelson-Atkins. Inspired by that gift, an anonymous donor loaned the Nelson-Atkins Helen Frankenthaler’s Elberta, another quintessential example of Color Field painting.

Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced that Baltimore businessman, author, and collector Stephen M. Salny has made a promised gift to the museum of 48 works on paper created by some of today’s leading contemporary artists, including 11 lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly. Among the other artists represented in the gift are Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell, and Sean Scully.

Salny’s gift will augment strengths of the Rose Art Museum collection, which includes paintings and other works by some of the artists included, notably Kelly, Johns, Motherwell, and Frankenthaler, while also extending its holdings in new directions, including the first work by Hirst to by acquired by the museum.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art on Friday announced a number of new art acquisitions, including Helen Frankenthaler's "Seven Types of Ambiguity" and Robert Rauschenberg's "The Tower," along with a reinstallation of its contemporary art gallery.

The acquisitions, which The New York Times valued at $20 million, join Georgia O'Keeffe's "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," which sold for a record-setting $44.4 million at Sotheby's in November, more than three times the previous record for a work by a woman artist. The Bentonville museum revealed that it had bought Jimson Weed in an announcement last week.

With a $200,000 donation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation will be the lead foundation donor for the US pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Last week, curator Okwui Enwezor announced the 136 artists and collectives included in the “All the World's Futures," the Biennale's main exhibition.

The gift was announced by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the organizer of the US pavilion, which will feature an immersive multimedia installation from veteran video and performance artist Joan Jonas, inspired by the work of writer Halldór Laxness as well as other literary sources.

In May 1957, Life magazine published a photo spread headlined “Women Artists in Ascendance.” The Life article is the opening gambit in “Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler,” a revisionist examination of painting from the 1950s to the present day, opening at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University on Feb. 11.

The story led with a full-page photo of Frankenthaler. In it, she’s seated — either on a painting, or on a drop cloth; it’s a sea of blue — in a neat pink blouse and a white skirt, her legs neatly tucked beneath her. She’s young and attractive. But there’s something defiant, something fed up, about her gaze.

On Saturday, January 31, 2015, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, will unveil its reinstalled collections of post-war and contemporary art. Featuring work from 1945 to the present, the collections will be housed in three dedicated galleries that have been newly renovated and refurbished over the past year.

The Wadsworth’s illustrious post-war and contemporary holdings will be divided between the Huntington Gallery, where mid-century abstract painting and sculpture by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Tony Smith will be displayed; the Hilles Gallery, which will feature works by Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle; and the Colt building’s mezzanine gallery, where one of Sol LeWitt’s famed wall drawings will be on view as well as works by other minimalists and conceptualists.

"New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 – 1970" was the Met’s most exciting exhibition to date under the auspices of director Thomas Hoving, who turned Henry Geldzahler loose to prick the art world to alertness. Paul Kasmin Gallery announces "The New York School, 1969: Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," on view at 293 Tenth Avenue from January 13 – March 14, 2015. Curated by Stewart Waltzer, this comprehensive group show reprises Geldzahler’s seminal exhibition and includes exemplary works by Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenberg, Jules Olitski, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, featuring works from the original exhibition.

Color Field painting arrived, in the late 1950s, at a moment of simultaneous exhaustion and innovation: fatigue with the Abstract Expressionist hegemony on the one hand, and radical new developments in paint chemistry on the other.

These forces conspired in a movement to make paintbrushes superfluous and to give color, the essence of painting, even more primacy. As the critic and Color Field champion Clement Greenberg put it, “The more closely color could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations.”

The lineup of scheduled “Dialogues” for this year’s edition of EXPO Chicago, which runs September 18–21 at Navy Pier, touches on virtually every corner of the art market, from grant-making at charitable foundations and the changing nature of collecting, to the history and importance of performance art, photography, and public art.

First up on the schedule for Friday September 19, is a conversation between Elizabeth Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Christy MacLear, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. They will discuss their respective foundations’ initiatives, including grant-making activities and legacy programs.

The fall gallery season is almost upon us and on September 11, Gagosian will kick off its 980 Madison Avenue venue with a series of early paintings by postwar abstractionist Helen Frankenthaler. “Composing with Color: Paintings 1962-1963” is the first exhibition of Frankenthaler’s work collaboratively organized with the recently established Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

“Gagosian Gallery was delighted to cooperate with the estate of Helen Frankenthaler in organizing an exhibition of her 1950s paintings last spring,” John Elderfield, curator of the exhibition, told Artinfo.