Helen Frankenthaler at Palazzo Strozzi
Our hotel is right nearby Palazzo Strozzi. Today this is a venue for cultural exhibitions but once was a family home of the Strozzi family who feuded with the Medici family during the Renaissance. Lucky me, this palazzo survived to host an exhibit of Helen Frankenthaler’s painting.
The exhibit includes a small number of companion pieces from Pollock, Motherwell, and Rothko. The show is overwhelmingly Frankenthaler, but these additions give a little historical context.
The exhibit winds around the atrium on the second floor of the Palazzo and ends with a video montage of several filmed interviews with the artist. Frankenthaler speaks about her process and her own training and education in modern art. She was an ardent student of modernism and cubism. In the video, she describes her work as an extension of those traditions, a natural outgrowth of those modes of thinking and painting. This makes the title of the show – Painting without Rules – seem a bit, I don’t know, out of touch with the painter and her work. Frankenthaler’s painting technique is an innovation born out of careful study of both history and of contemporary artists around her at the time (Pollock and friends).
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. What matters is these paintings are gorgeous. One in particular Ocean Drive West #1 from 1974 made me feel like I stood at the bottom of a deep swimming pool, looking up at the sky. The colors are so deep and they create such subtle shapes and hard edges. The image evokes landscape without being a landscape, and without any visual cliches like a big horizontal line to mimic the horizon. As the title suggests there is a sense of motion, of driving by, and a sense of distance. It’s like the emotional impact of a drive down the coast was distilled into an aquamarine liquor, then chilled to freezing. It comes to life on your tongue and makes you remember the lives of your ancestors.
The piece reminds of a piece, Swimming Pool by Leandro Ehrlich. Elrich's piece is a literal swimming pool, deconstructed so that you can experience it without scuba gear. Both pieces put me in a similar state of mind.
The exhibit opens with an enormous, wide, panorama Movable Blue from 1973. The painting is more than 20 feet wide and 5 feet tall. An immense blue pool takes most of the frame, bordered by golden yellow and lavender grey. The image evokes estuaries and coast line, but also a grotto or the mouth of a cave. It is at once sunny and open, and enveloping. When I arrived at the show, an older couple entered just before me. The husband (the art lover) kissed his wife good bye and we found ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder admiring this painting before wandering through the rest of the show.