Nature Abhors a Vacuum
Helen Frankenthaler
HELEN FRANKENTHALER, 1973. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS.
Having allowed chance and chaos to be collaborators for most of her career, pioneering color-field painting through the soak-stain technique, Frankenthaler began to wrest back some control. Shortly before painting this work, she had spent time in England working on a series of welded sculptures and contemplating large public commissions of her work. These two ideas were front of her mind when painting ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ as the large swathes of colour so synonymous with her paintings find themselves, for almost the first time, with hard edges. She used wood and tape to block the flow of paint from differing areas of the canvas, restricting the freedom that the paint had once enjoyed, and relegating its status from collator to assistant. Having long embraced a lack of control, here Frankenthaler guides the outcome more, suggesting a maturity in her relationship to her process. ‘You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it”, she said, ‘So that the whole surface looks felt and born at once”.