Helen Frankenthaler, Open Wall, 1953; Oil on canvas, 136.5 × 332.7 cm. © 2024 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

For the past few weeks, Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi has showcased the unique creative energy and uncompromising vision of painter Helen Frankenthaler, an American whose work left an indelible mark on the global art world. This extensive exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and curated by Douglas Dreishpoon, director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné, serves as a testament to her genius. One of the first major exhibitions dedicated to Frankenthaler outside the U.S., it masterfully unpacks the influences and exchanges that shaped her art while affirming her pivotal role in the evolution from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting.

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Here, floating chromatic vibrations radiate from delicate acrylic veils draped across landscape-shaped canvases, shimmering with an interplay of translucency and transparency. These works strive to seize fleeting atmospheres and synesthetic impressions, balancing nature, light, and multi-sensory inputs in an exquisite dance.

Surveying the artist’s poetic abstractions between 1953 and 2002, the exhibition culminates with paintings on paper from the ‘90s, a lesser-known aspect of her later-career work. “As the largest Frankenthaler exhibition to date in Italy, ‘Painting Without Rules’ introduces some audiences to Frankenthaler’s work for the first time, and for those already familiar, casts her legacy in a new light,” Dreishpoon told Observer. “While her work has been previously exhibited in group shows, along with kindred contemporaries, the roundup at Palazzo Strozzi highlights formative influences and affinities.” Friendship, he added, is a pivotal part of this project, as relationships offer another way to contextualize Frankenthaler’s innovations.

Frankenthaler was one of the trailblazing women of her era, a rare talent who secured acknowledgment and recognition in a fiercely male-dominated art scene. At just twenty-two, she was among the “amazons” of the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show—a watershed moment in American abstraction. Sharing the stage with giants like Pollock, Kline and De Kooning, as well as pioneering women like Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, Frankenthaler made a bold statement. Her contribution, a painting over seven feet long, was the largest submitted. It was her way of proclaiming that her talent extended far beyond the shadow of being “Clem’s Girl”—a reference to her then-boyfriend, the formidable art critic Clement Greenberg. Unconcerned with artistic or societal limits, she hauled the massive painting from her nearby studio without asking for permission—an audacious move that epitomized her originality and unrestrained creativity, inspiring a generation of artists to follow.

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The roots of her rebellious spirit likely stemmed from her upbringing in a conservative German-Jewish household as the daughter of a judge. Yet, this disciplined background may have provided her with the resilience needed to break through the glass ceilings of her time. Frankenthaler’s willingness to defy conventions and embrace freedom is beautifully encapsulated in the exhibition’s title. She consistently pushed boundaries, reimagining abstraction as a medium that could capture both the visceral and the ethereal. Her works evoke poetic allusions to natural and psycho-emotive atmospheres, blending........

© Observer