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‘Helen Frankenthaler: Prints 1977–2004’ Exhibition in Singapore A Dialogue with Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Art enthusiasts and connoisseurs have a rare opportunity to experience the groundbreaking work of Helen Frankenthaler at the STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery in Singapore. The Annual Special Exhibition, ‘Helen Frankenthaler: Prints 1977–2004,’ running from June 29 to August 25, showcases nearly 40 of Frankenthaler’s print works, marking one of the most extensive displays of her art in Asia to date.

 

Helen Frankenthaler, a pivotal figure in modern abstract expressionism, revolutionized the art world with her innovative techniques and visionary approach. This exhibition, with works drawn from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the National Collection of Singapore, offers an in-depth look at her contributions to printmaking—a medium she continuously reinvented throughout her career.

 

To delve deeper into the significance of this exhibition and the enduring legacy of Helen Frankenthaler, we had the privilege of speaking with Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. With her extensive background in art history and museum curation, Smith provides unique insights into Frankenthaler’s artistic journey, her groundbreaking collaborations, and the Foundation’s ongoing efforts to preserve and promote her work.


STPI Annual Special Exhibition _ Helen Frankenthaler_ Prints 1977–2004, Installation View  Image courtesy of STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore

STPI Annual Special Exhibition _ Helen Frankenthaler_ Prints 1977–2004, Installation View

Image courtesy of STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore

 

Gen de Art: Could you start by telling us about the significance of Helen Frankenthaler’s collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and how it influenced her printmaking practice?

 

Smith: Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Tyler collaborated for 26 years, during which Frankenthaler’s approach to printmaking became increasingly experimental and complex. At the time of their collaboration, Tyler Graphics Ltd. was known as the print workshop with the greatest technical capacity in the U.S. With Ken Tyler’s encouragement and the abilities of his workshop to make large-scale and complex prints, Frankenthaler found a kindred spirit in his attitude of a “no rules” approach. Other aspects of Tyler’s workshop, such as its ability to make handmade paper, were also crucially important in allowing Frankenthaler’s prints to convey increasingly textural effects. Tyler privileged the vision of the artist and dedicated his team to helping them realize and execute works in print mediums that often stretched the boundaries of established practices. He described his working relationship with Frankenthaler as “a wonderful confrontational and trusting collaboration, based on pushing the limits of her printmaking.”

 

While working with Tyler, Frankenthaler made some of her best-known and most admired prints. Many of these were woodcuts. They ranged from Essence Mulberry (1977), which according to Tyler was significant in shaping Frankenthaler’s thinking that a print could rival a painting in beauty and quality, to Freefall (1994), the Tales of Genji series (1998), and Madame Butterfly (2000), among many others.

 

Kenneth Tyler would later become a significant figure in the establishment of STPI, where the collaborative spirit between Tyler and Frankenthaler continues to be deeply rooted in STPI’s residency programme today. It’s also why it’s been wonderful for the foundation to showcase an outstanding selection of Helen Frankenthaler’s print works on the occasion of STPI’s Annual Special Exhibition this June – one of her largest presentations to be shown in Singapore to date. By exploring her influential partnership with Tyler, we can celebrate Frankenthaler as an artist and trailblazer, one who constantly sought to materialize new creative possibilities.

 

Gen de Art: How did Frankenthaler’s contributions to the American Print Renaissance impact the broader art world, and what aspects of this influence are highlighted in the exhibition?

 

Smith: The so-called American Print Renaissance came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of workshops that encouraged prominent contemporary artists to experiment with printmaking. Tyler Graphics was one of several such noted workshops throughout the U.S., including Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Gemini GEL, Crown Point Press, and Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Frankenthaler’s embrace of printmaking, which started in 1961 when she first worked with ULAE and continued until 2009, impacted the broader art world in that her body of print works paralleled her painting practice in intriguing and significant ways. Engaging deeply and experimenting with the properties of each print medium, she achieved unprecedented effects in her corpus of print work that continue to be recognized as singular achievements. Frankenthaler’s woodcuts are particularly acclaimed for their significance and influence on the field. Her work has been credited with launching the revival of interest in this medium for contemporary artists beginning in the mid-1970s.

 

The exhibition not only demonstrates Frankenthaler’s commitment to printmaking over decades but also highlights her use of an astonishing variety of methods and techniques. The painterly qualities she was able to achieve in prints spanning lithography, soft-ground and sugar-lift etching, aquatint, drypoint, monoprint, monotype, and woodcut as well as her experiments with prints in book format and in a series of freestanding screens, one of which is included in the exhibition, reveal the range of her practice and her freewheeling, open attitude to the possibilities of printmaking.

 

Gen de Art: The exhibition showcases Frankenthaler’s woodcuts prominently. What makes her approach to woodcuts unique compared to other forms of printmaking she engaged in?

 

Smith: The medium of woodcut is among the most rigid and exacting forms of printmaking and would seem to be antithetical to the qualities of spontaneity, fluidity, and gestural mark-making that are such important characteristics of Frankenthaler’s art overall. Nevertheless, she was able to master the technique to convey these effects, at times preferring to cut the wood blocks herself, using a jigsaw, to shape compositions that appeared fluid and organic. She also manipulated wood surfaces, using tools such as cheese graters, sandpaper, or dental tools as part of a treatment called guzzying, to create more textured effects. Some of her woodcuts were printed on handmade paper created specially to convey the appearance of woodgrain. She utilized many colors in each woodcut to achieve extraordinary chromatic range and the variegated, nuanced appearance also found in her paintings.

 

The woodcut process offered Frankenthaler the possibility to be more actively and physically involved than other print mediums. It also represented a thrilling challenge while working closely and collaboratively with Ken Tyler and his team. As her work with woodcuts progressed and became increasingly complex, Frankenthaler relied ever more deeply on the studio team to translate her painted maquettes into a final form, creating numerous proofs along the way as an integral part of the process.

 

Gen de Art: One of the exhibition highlights is Madame Butterfly. Could you discuss the inspiration and process behind this piece and how it represents Frankenthaler’s ability to blend Eastern and Western printmaking styles?

 

Smith: Madame Butterfly is one of Frankenthaler’s largest and most admired woodcuts. Made in 2000, it followed a group of six woodcuts completed in 1998 titled Tales of Genji, all of which were highly complex in the number of blocks and colors utilized. Of great importance to the making of these woodcuts was the participation of Yasuyuki Shibata, an expert in ukiyo-e technique who had come from Japan to work at Tyler Graphics. He was able to assist with translating Frankenthaler’s complex vision through his skilled adaptation of her initial designs, painted directly onto pieces of wood, into trial proofs which she could then further refine—a hybrid approach to conventional woodcut practice and an adaptation of the ukiyo-e technique.

 

A monumental triptych, Madame Butterfly presents us with what curator Judith Goldman has called a “heartbreaking, evanescent quality.” Inspired by a Japanese screen, Frankenthaler first experimented with unconventional materials such as silk and metallic paints but then decided to paint directly on three pieces of wood, from which the studio created handmade paper to match their surfaces. Blocks were then carved, which Frankenthaler guzzied by marking them with tools to create more texture and interest. The printing process required speed and precision. Frankenthaler considered numerous proofs in collaboration with the workshop team until she arrived at the version that captured the essence of her ideas and their visual qualities to the fullest.

 

Gateway is noted as one of Frankenthaler’s most ambitious multimedia projects. What were some of the challenges and breakthroughs she experienced during the six-year creation process of this series? 

 

The Gateway series comprising 12 freestanding screens constitutes an audacious approach to combining print with other materials and techniques that are rarely juxtaposed. The process was a complex one.  For the first time, Frankenthaler painted directly onto bronze panels, using a mixture of pigment and chemicals for one side of each two-sided, freestanding screen. The reverse side of each features prints using etching, relief, and aquatint techniques and hand-stencilled borders on handmade paper.  Each screen was therefore slightly different, yielding an imposing group of related works that are all in some way unique.

 

While the challenges of the Gateway series were numerous from a technical standpoint and the number of years it took to complete, the breakthroughs included the creation of work that Frankenthaler print expert Ruth Fine has described as “part painting, part sculpture, and part print.”  And for Frankenthaler, the goal of the whole working together so that space, color, drawing, and material read as one, was a consummately important accomplishment.

 

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has played a crucial role in advancing the artist's legacy. Can you share some of the Foundation's recent initiatives and future plans to continue promoting her work and influence.

 

Since becoming active in 2013, the Foundation has pursued a mission to advance the artist’s legacy for the public benefit and inspire a new generation of practitioners through a range of initiatives.

 

With Helen Frankenthaler’s centennial approaching in 2028, we are pleased that a major retrospective devoted to the artist will be curated and presented by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., that year, and is expected to tour nationally and internationally.  In the nearer term, we are co-organizing a survey with the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence that places Frankenthaler’s work in dialogue with that of her peers, to open this fall.  We also actively lend from our extensive collection of works by Frankenthaler. Most recently, we have lent notable groupings to European institutions—ranging from the Tate Modern in London to the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. Our current loans to STPI help to extend Frankenthaler’s presence in Asia, as her work has been infrequently shown there to date.

 

Alongside these curatorial initiatives, the Foundation is advancing a catalogue raisonné project documenting the full spectrum of Frankenthaler’s work.  We also regularly assist scholars with research projects and are anticipating a revised, expanded edition of a monograph on the artist by eminent Frankenthaler expert John Elderfield this fall.  

 

The Foundation’s notable philanthropic program includes support for academic study, with a particular emphasis on higher education. Most recently, the Foundation announced its endowment of a new fellowship in modern and contemporary art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Other key initiatives include the Frankenthaler Prints Initiative, consisting of gifts of prints and funds to support their study to university museums throughout the U.S., as well as MFA and PhD scholarships for students of art history at a range of graduate programs. The Foundation also supports opportunities for living artists, such as the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ICSP). And In 2020, the Foundation established a multi-year COVID-19 Relief Effort to support artists and arts organizations during that critical period.

 

In 2021 the Foundation launched what has become its signature philanthropic program to date:  the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative. Conceived originally as a three-year pilot program to help museums and arts organizations in the U.S. assess their environmental impact and become more energy efficient, FCI has expanded to $ 15M USD with grant-making cycles planned at least through 2025 and has conferred more than $ 10M USD to date to nearly 150 visual arts organizations across the United States.

 


STPI Annual Special Exhibition _ Helen Frankenthaler_ Prints 1977–2004, Installation View

Image courtesy of STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore


STPI Annual Special Exhibition _ Helen Frankenthaler_ Prints 1977–2004, Installation View

Image courtesy of STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore

 

More information

 

Helen Frankenthaler: Prints 1977–2004

Date: 29 June – 25 August

Address: STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, 41, Robertson Quay, Singapore 238236

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