1959, Helen Frankenthaler, Mother Goose Melody -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
"The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes a painting unique and necessary. Painting, in many ways, is a glorious illusion." -Helen Frankenthaler
In Mother Goose Melody, Frankenthaler combines the gestural splashes and drips of Abstract Expressionist painting with the innovative stained-canvas technique she helped pioneer in 1952. The array of colors, shapes, and lines makes this composition rhythmic and dynamic. The spiraling red form on the right counters the dense area of color on the left, while the broad yellow band stretching across the bottom unites both. The artist noted that the three brown shapes could refer to herself and her two sisters, and the red and black lines "made a sort of stork figure--the whole thing had a nursery-rhyme feeling."
1959, Helen Frankenthaler, Mother Goose Melody -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond)
From the museum label:
"The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes a painting unique and necessary. Painting, in many ways, is a glorious illusion." -Helen Frankenthaler
In Mother Goose Melody, Frankenthaler combines the gestural splashes and drips of Abstract Expressionist painting with the innovative stained-canvas technique she helped pioneer in 1952. The array of colors, shapes, and lines makes this composition rhythmic and dynamic. The spiraling red form on the right counters the dense area of color on the left, while the broad yellow band stretching across the bottom unites both. The artist noted that the three brown shapes could refer to herself and her two sisters, and the red and black lines "made a sort of stork figure--the whole thing had a nursery-rhyme feeling."