Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 8 of 11

Blue Jay by Helen Frankenthaler, painted 1963. 

Helen Frankenthaler rose to prominence in the 1950s as one of America’s Abstract Expressionists, the movement that originated in New York and was pioneered by American painters Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. 

Frankenthaler painted spontaneously, often moving around a large sheet of canvas on her studio floor. Back and forth, almost, as someone noted, like dancing. 

She changed her tools, from brushes to sponges to turkey basters to squeegees, as she might have used here, in the orangey-red pool of colour to the left. But it was one particular technique that was an artistic breakthrough that influenced many other painters. Instead of applying oil paint with a brush, she thinned the paint with turpentine, and poured it straight onto the canvas, and the liquid would literally sink the image into its surface. 

Choosing a large-scale canvas to create simple abstract images was like making a big statement. But what is the statement? 

Frankenthaler was building on the legacy of pure abstraction that emerged in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, through artists like Piet Mondrian and Sonia Delaunay.  

The first half of the twentieth century, with its two world wars and cultural strife, led to the fracturing of the traditional artistic centres in Europe and a shift to the United States.

In New York, Abstract Expressionism took off, where painting was an act of pure emotion and instinct, without form. The title Blue Jay, may have been taken from a poem she liked, but it isn’t much of a clue to the work.

Frankenthaler was a woman working in the 1950s in an art movement famous for its tough masculinity. Its best-known artists, Pollock and Willem de Kooning, attacked their canvases with splatters, streaks, and smears. Frankenthaler’s soak-stains became another strand of this called colour-field. And despite the male artists commonly associated with it, there were many women working in Abstract Expressionism. 

In Blue Jay, the soak-stain technique creates a halo effect, the thinned paint pooling like watercolour.  Further on in the gallery, you can also see Frankenthaler’s woodcut print Madame Butterfly. This was made forty years after Blue Jay and is recognised as one of the artist’s finest achievements, composed of over one hundred colour woodcuts from forty-six woodblocks and printed on handmade paper, made to resemble wood.