Mother Goose Melody (Primary Title)
Helen Frankenthaler, American, 1928 - 2011 (Artist)
The painter makes something magical, spatial, and alive on a surface that is flat and with materials that are inert. That magic is what makes a painting unique and necessary. Painting, in many ways, is a glorious illusion. —Helen Frankenthaler
In Mother Goose Melody, Frankenthaler combines the gestural splashes and drips of Abstract Expressionist painting with the innovative stained-canvas technique she helped pioneer in 1952. The array of colors, shapes, and lines makes this composition rhythmic and dynamic. The spiraling red form on the right counters the dense area of color on the left, while the broad yellow band stretching across the bottom unites both. The artist noted that the three brown shapes could refer to herself and her two sisters, and that the red and black lines “made a sort of stork figure—the whole thing had a nursery-rhyme feeling.”
Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler, 1950 - 1959, Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY, March 9 - April 13, 2013
After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler, 1956 - 1959, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, January 16 - May 3, 1998; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, June 6 - October 4, 1998; Guggenheim Museum, Berlin, Germany, October 14, 1998 - January 31, 1999
Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective," The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, May 24 – August 24, 1989; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, November 19, 1989 – January 7, 1990; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, February 8 – March 22, 1990; Detroit Institute of Art, May – September 2, 1990
Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945 - 1986, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, December 10, 1986 – January 10, 1988
Andrew Wyeth: A Trojan Horse Modernist, Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC, March 9 - April 15, 1984
Frankenthaler: The 1950s, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, May 10 - June 28, 1981
Art in America Show, Decorative Arts Center, New York, NY, 1961
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