“A line, color, shapes, spaces, all do one thing for and within themselves, and yet do something else, in relation to everything that is going on within the four sides [of the canvas]. A line is a line, but [also] is a color... It does this here, but that there. The canvas surface is flat and yet the space extends for miles. What a lie, what trickery—how beautiful is the very idea of painting.”
—Helen FrankenthalerHelen Frankenthaler’s Spirits of Wine, 1972, depicts a delicate array of color, line and space. Vibrant greens border the edges of the almost six-foot-tall canvas, giving way to an orange field which flanks the pink central passage, creating an almost canyon-like effect within an otherwise abstract composition. Encapsulating a synergy of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting and Minimalism, Spirits of Wine is an exceptional example of Frankenthaler’s famed soak-stain technique. The work has remained in the same collection since 1975 and hasn’t been seen in the public since the 1976 America Now exhibition at The Minneapolis Institute of Art.
The artist in her East 83rd Street studio, with the present work (right). Artwork: © 2024 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Color
Created at a key juncture in her practice, Spirits of Wine opts for diluted acrylic paint over the artist’s previously used thinned oil paint. This departure allowed for her compositions to breathe beneath the painted surfaces and leant themselves to her pioneering soak-stained technique. Likely originating from a childhood habit of pouring her mother’s red nail polish into a bathroom sink filled with cold water and watching the polish disperse to create abstracted forms, Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique was first seen in her 1952 masterpiece, Mountains and Sea, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.i Challenging the methods of her Abstract Expressionist forebearers, Frankenthaler used thin applications of vast pools of paint, which embraced the canvas, rather than hiding it behind layers of thick impasto. Even through the layering of her stained veils of paint, the viewer can see the intricate weave of the canvas itself, creating an airy, almost ethereal quality to the painting. Though she was not the first artist to dilute her paints – artists such as Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky and Arshile Gorky had been using this technique in their respective practices decades prior – Frankenthaler would become a pioneer of the soak-stain method, influencing artists like Jules Olitski, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.Line
Using orange and bright white thin lines to draw the viewer’s eyes down, the composition encourages the viewer to take in the painting in its entirety. The present work explores the combination of drawing and painting, used as a means to amplify her soak-stained paintings. Blurring the lines between the two mediums, Frankenthaler’s practice during this time “modulated, monochromatic fields of color with irregularly shaped fissures or crevices of bare canvas, around which the filaments of drawing are clustered and within which, at times, notations of other colors appear. The format of these pictures recalls Clyfford Still and allows of a Still-like sense of color zones spreading organically toward each other across the flat surface. But the abrupt accents of drawing pull and pin back the opposing tides, reversing their movement while producing the illusion of paper-like thinness in the color itself.”ii In Spirits of Wine, the lines are less overt, but the effect of this mark-making style is still subtly evident. This constant, self-referential reimagining of her own techniques persisted throughout the entirety of the artist’s practice.
Left: Helen Frankenthaler, Barbizon, 1971, Private Collection. Artwork: © 2024 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Right: Clyfford Still, PH-571 (1951-N), 1951, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, Gift in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1989.87.1, Artwork: © 2024 City & County of Denver, Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York“No longer are corners and edges ignored. But since image and painting surface are coextensive now – unrolling horizontally out from the center – the corners and edges are less boundaries than before. They had previously been neutralized by being ignored. Now, they are expanded.”
—John ElderfieldSpace
In layering colors and forms atop one another, Frankenthaler was constantly exploring the notion of space, a preoccupation which is very evident in the present work. The rendering of a seemingly infinite space within Spirits of Wine is even more astonishing considering the flat, unprimed canvas ground which serves as its foundation. Allowing the paint to sit on the surface and fully soak into the canvas, Frankenthaler gives life to the otherwise flat surface through the depth and intensity of the colors she uses. The arrangement of color appears as if spilt wine, deeper in the center and growing evermore translucent working outwards, adding a sense of three-dimensionality to the work that is unique to her compositions.
Georgia O’Keeffe, From the Lake No. 3, 1924, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe for the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987, Artwork: © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York While entirely abstract, Frankenthaler’s paintings do seem to reference landscapes and figures in interesting ways. The present work is an almost bodily representation of a landscape. The curvy outlines of the green frame the pink center which resemble a deep canyon, or perhaps the inner anatomy of a figure. This is reminiscent of the dual-meaning landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe, whose iconic paintings often disguise references to female anatomy in pastel landscapes. Spirits of Wine transports the viewers to an undescribed place, allowing them to create their own interpretations of the painting. Frankenthaler herself noted, “There is no ‘always.’ No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.”iii
iAlex Greenberger, “Helen Frankenthaler’s Liberated Abstractions Charted a New Path for Painting,” Art in America, March 12, 2021, online.
iiJohn Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York, 1987, n.p.
iiiHelen Frankenthaler, quoted in Ted Loos, ”ART/ARCHITECTURE; Helen Frankenthaler, Back to the Future,” New York Times, April 27, 2003, online.
Provenance
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Locksley Shea Gallery, Minneapolis
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1975)
Thence by descent to the present ownerExhibited
The Minneapolis Institute of Art, America Now, February 28–May 2, 1976
Literature
Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings, 1962–1987, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, 2016, p. 48 (illustrated in a preliminary state in the artist's studio, frontispiece and p. 48)
Property from a Private Midwestern Collection
133
Spirits of Wine
titled and dated "SPIRITS OF WINE - (1972 - AUGUST) SPIRITS OF WINE" on the stretcher
acrylic on canvas
69 5/8 x 43 1/4 in. (176.8 x 109.9 cm)
Painted in 1972.
Estimate
$1,200,000 - 1,800,000
Sold for $1,168,400
Annie Dolan
NY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com
Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session
New York Auction 15 May 2024
117
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142
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158
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175
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