Page 33 - "he 2020 Guggenheim issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

Helen Frankenthaler
Canal, 1963 Acrylic on canvas, 208.3 x 146.1 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York, Purchased with the aid of funds from the National
Endowment for the Arts, in Washington, D.C., a federal agency; matching
funds Contributed by Evelyn Sharp 76.2225 © 2019 Helen Frankenthaler
Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Kenneth Noland
Trans Shift, 1964 Acrylic on canvas, 254 x 288.3 cm. Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by
Elaine and Werner Dannheisser and The Dannheisser Foundation 81.2812
© 2019 The Kenneth Noland Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists
Rights Society (ARS), NY

The Fullness of Color is organized by Megan Fontanella, saturating it like a dye. Others similarly treated figure
Curator, Modern Art and Provenance, with support from and ground as one and the same. Morris Louis, Kenneth
Indira Abiskaroon, Curatorial Assistant, Collections. Noland, and Jules Olitski, for instance, methodically
Major support for the exhibition is provided by Barbara poured, soaked, or sprayed paint, producing
Slifka and LLWW Foundation. compositions with a more systematic appearance
than those of their Abstract Expressionist forbearers.
By the 1960s many American and international artists While Alma Thomas also adeptly applied color theory
were pushing abstraction in new directions, exploring a throughout the 1960s and beyond, she nonetheless
range of formal possibilities and liberating uses of color continued to create expressive marks and draw upon
in their work. This shift-which occurred in the wake her observations of the natural world. Still other
of Abstract Expressionism, the largely gestural and painters approached relationships of form and color
emotive movement that had dominated the post-World through investigations of optical perception or through
War II art world-yielded a number of divergent styles. more precise, geometric languages that, as Guggenheim
Helen Frankenthaler, who in 1952 had pioneered the curator Lawrence Alloway described in 1966, ”combined
”soak-stain” technique, now regularly applied thinned economy of form and neatness of surface with fullness
acrylic washes to unprimed cotton canvas, richly of color.”

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