Walking through “Abstract Expressionists: The Women,” curator Tera Hedrick points out “Bending Blue,” a painting by Helen Frankenthaler.
“If you don't love, or you don't know or you don't have a ton of experience with abstract expressionism, I think this is a great place to start,” Hedrick said.
Director Molly McPherson admires the work Frankenthaler, who also has a piece in the permanent WAM collection.
“I would just say I love the scale of this piece,” McPherson said. “When you ... turn the corner and come into this final gallery, you have Helen Frankenthaler and you have Joan Mitchell, and these are women whose art is taking up space.”
“Bending Blue” is a work of art that is bright and bold. Hedrick discusses how a piece of abstract expressionism like this can illcit an a emotion.
“Part of what abstract expressionism is about is the experience of looking, the experience of feeling, the experience of standing in front of a painting and feeling the color and feeling the shapes, and feeling the way the colors and the shapes interact, and they push and pull, and they speak to each other, and they dance with each other.”
“Bending Blue” is the kind of piece that towers over the viewer.
“It's supposed to take up your whole visual field, right? You're supposed to stand in front of it and feel enveloped by it, surrounded by it, overwhelmed by it in the way you get enveloped by the sky or the sea or nature,” Hedrick said. “And that's what Frankenthaler wants us to experience when we stand in front of the work.”
Enthusiastically, Hedrick then steers us toward another Frankenthaler painting titled “After Rubens.”
“And if you know your art history, you know that Rubens was a northern Baroque painter famous for his gorgeous, beautiful, fleshy, rotund [and] incredibly, you know, zaptic ladies.”
Frankenthaler takes inspiration from Ruben's work and makes it her own.
“ It is a riff on and a take on a portrait of Rubens' wife, but she has this gorgeous fur blanket,” Hedrick said. “And so you can see the brown, the reference to the fur, right?”
Hedrick points out the process Frankenthaler used for creating this painting.
“She's staining the canvas,” Hedrick said. “So you can see the bare canvas, right? She would have laid it on the ground, and then she would have taken her paint, and she would have thinned out the paint, and then she would have poured the paint. We can also see places where she would have scrubbed it on more heavily, and it creates a painting where the paint isn't sitting on the surface of the canvas, but it has been soaked into the canvas.”
This painting approach is unique in a show where other artists are building up paint, making for thicker canvases. It’s obvious this artist is a staff favorite, and they love the reference to, and take pride in, the Wichita Art Museum’s collection, which celebrates a Frankenthaler of its own.
“[It’s a] delightful parallel with our own piece, which is my favorite work of art in Wichita Museum's collection, McPherson said.
The show, “Abstract Expressionists: The Women,” has been extended to November 30th. Admission to the exhibit is free tomorrow.
