Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Helen Frankenthaler
American; 20th-century
Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art
53%
Focus on Mars. 1976. Acrylic on canvas
There's a rightward thrust to all this painting's marks that works against the open bigness of its big blue expanse. Not much besides this touch of directionality, though, justifies how utterly that blue swath is structure-swallowing. The overall arrangement of the marks doesn't do it (diffuse), nor does the particular character of any individual one of them (scratchy, noncommittal). There's a touch of orange in the upper right corner chirping across the canvas at a bit of tanned yellow within blocks and bars at left, but the form that conveys this chirp — a graduating undular band of marine pushed against the picture's upper edge — is way too demure in its relationship with the huge blue field beneath it; this makes the cross-canvas color-play which the band is meant to facilitate seem like a cute effect rather than a structural necessity. Sans that band, though, orange and yellow would've been shouting at each other across an unbridged gulf of aqua. This might have seemed tragic and been to the painting's benefit. (2025)