Artist, Helen Frankenthaler: I think that modernism changed the surface of a canvas. It was no longer something you looked into with background, foreground, etc., but a flat experience that could stretch out in any direction, limitless.
Curator, Samantha Friedman: In Frankenthaler’s painting of the 1970s, there was a renewed presence of line, and her scale becomes more ambitious than ever. Frankenthaler said about this painting: “It was about a grand sweep. I had the basic idea in my head. I knew how the lines would dance in. I felt sure of myself.”
I think for her, scale is about ambition, it’s about confidence. This title, Chairman of the Board, has a certain bravado, but it’s also about immersiveness.
Helen Frankenthaler: My best pictures are generally my large pictures, and I think that's because of edges and surface and another kind of perspective.
Samantha Friedman: The initial impression of this picture is to really be flooded with orange. She’s also offsetting that with this gully of raw canvas that cuts through the landscape of the picture, that she refers to as a “crevice.” But then also these touches of color and this series of lines that radiate out almost like a belly button at the center of the painting.
Helen Frankenthaler: Any picture that works, even if it is in the guise of pure color application, involves drawing. And I mixed funny shades of color because they made the drawing in my picture move.
Archival audio from: Oral History with Helen Frankenthaler, Interviewed by Joseph Dorman, February 9, 1995. Columbia Center for Oral History, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries; American Art in the 1960s. 1972. United States. Directed by Michael Blackwood. Courtesy Michael Blackwood Productions and Benjamin Blackwood; and Oral history interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution