“Big sweep; big scale,” Frankenthaler declared about this painting, her second largest at the time that she made it. She referred to the negative space of raw canvas cutting through the orange, horizontal expanse as a “crevice/cable”: as if it were at once a fissure and a cord. Describing the lines that “‘bridge the gap’ literally—from the outside to the inside of the crevice,” the artist noted that they “were made all at once, in one ‘fell swoop.’”
Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep, November 18, 2025–February 8, 2026
Gallery label from 2009
A river of raw canvas cuts across the vast expanse of this orange painting. "I frequently leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted," Frankenthaler has said. "That 'negative' space has just as active a role as the 'positive' painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.” In this work, the artist experimented with different ways to produce line: the thin, spindly black lines that radiate from the central cluster of shapes are drawn, but she also used color to create line, as the edges of the orange paint demonstrate. In these subtle manipulations of line, color, and canvas, Chairman of the Board is a meditation on the formal qualities of painting itself.
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Helen Frankenthaler
American, 1928–2011 67 works onlineThe artist Helen Frankenthaler has offered two childhood scenes as foundational stories for the path her innovative practice would take.
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