‘Like a Rothko dancing wildly to jazz’ – Helen Frankenthaler review

Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
She invented staggering new ways to paint, but it was the men who followed her who got all the credit. Now this towering figure is finally getting her due

You generally have to go to New York to do abstract expressionism properly. For a moment, among Helen Frankenthaler’s very, very big paintings, I thought I was there among the skyscrapers, until I looked out of the window and saw some blokes sweating outside a Georgian sandwich shop.

Forgetting the everyday again, my eyes sank into a purple haze. Frankenthaler invented a way of painting by letting colour soak into an unprepared canvas on her studio floor. The results, all around you in this brilliant selection, are entrancing and authoritative. The colours are definitely inside the surface, not on it. They are fused into the unprimed fabric: pooled, puddled, and left to dry. Then, gazing into her own paint lagoons, Frankenthaler has sometimes put a line around a blot, seen a face in a stain, an island in a spillage.

Related: ‘He was aware of racist pigeonholes’: how Basquiat took inspiration from jazz, hip-hop and no wave

Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 27 August.

Continue reading...