Description
Critics, historians, and artists have credited Helen Frankenthaler with initiating the development of that branch of Abstract Expressionism known as color-field painting. Frankenthaler was influenced by Jackson Pollock's revolutionary technique of dripping paint on large canvases laid out on the floor and by the open, expansive scale of his paintings. She concentrated on using color stained directly into canvas. Through this technique, she was able to achieve the modernist objective of identifying color and form with the flatness and materiality of the canvas while simultaneously creating an illusion of space through the contrast of color. Her process produced distinct forms that appear to have been created independently of the artist. Capri, for example, is vaguely reminiscent of a landscape seen from an aerial perspective. Encouraged by the title, which refers to the Italian resort just off the west coast of Italy, the viewer might read the central dark shape as an island surrounded by water. The bright, luminous color of the painting and its thin, watery consistency reinforce this impression. Nevertheless, these associations remain ambiguous, and Capri can more readily be compared to the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko. Its large size, floating forms, and format, which vaguely reinforces the rectilinear outline of the stretcher, recall the older artist's paintings.
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Details
- Work Date:
- 1967
- Location:
- Corning Tower Concourse Lobby
- Dimensions:
- 10'-3 3/4" x 9'-11 1/2"
- Medium:
- Acrylic on canvas