For the first time ever Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and Agapanthus(1914–1917) will travel to the UK for a special display at Dulwich Picture Gallery as part of its major new exhibition Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty. It will be shown alongside Frankenthaler’s monumental painting Feather(1979) in a one-off visual experience that will reveal similarities in ambition and approach.
A founding figure of Impressionism, Claude Monet (1840–1926) spent the last thirty years of his life depicting the lily pond in his water garden in Giverny, France. Initially, the works he created were small and descriptive, but over time they became increasingly abstract and grander in scale. The culmination of this period was an epic series of water lily panoramas.
Water Lilies and Agapanthusdemonstrates Monet’s pioneering use of broader, freer strokes, intricately built-up textures, and bold juxtapositions of colour, opening the door for later abstract artists like Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011). By considering the work alongside Frankenthaler’s Feather, in which colours mix, layer, and fold into each other, we can compare the extraordinary ability of both artists to capture the transience of nature through paint.
Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty will be the first major UK exhibition of the leading abstract expressionist, presenting thirty woodcut prints on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York. Shining a light on the artist’s groundbreaking woodcuts it will showcase works never shown before in the UK, to reveal Frankenthaler as a creative force and a trailblazer of printmaking, who endlessly pushed the possibilities of the medium.
Ranging from Frankenthaler’s first ever woodcut in 1973, to her last work published in 2009, this major print retrospective will bring together 36 works on loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, including Madame Butterfly (2000), East and Beyond (1973) to reveal the enormous diversity in scale and technique in her oeuvre. Challenging traditional notions of woodcut printmaking, the exhibition will reveal the charge and energy behind Frankenthaler’s ‘no rules’ approach, arranged thematically to spotlight the elements crucial to her unique style of mark-marking, from experimentation to inspiration and collaboration.
At the age of only 23 Frankenthaler created her influential oil painting Mountains and Sea (1952), the first work produced using her signature soak stain technique – pouring thinned paint directly onto canvas from above to create broad expanses of translucent color. It was a breakthrough that would propel Frankenthaler into the spotlight of the New York art scene at a time where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning dominated. This technique went on to influence the artists of the Color Field school of painting, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and had a profound impact on her printmaking career.
Opening ten years after her death, ‘Radical Beauty’ examines Frankenthaler’s revolutionary approach to the woodcut, positioning her as one of the medium’s great innovators. In the same way as she did with her earlier paintings, Frankenthaler defied the limitations of what is often considered the most rudimentary of printmaking techniques; she found new dimensions to the medium, experimenting with different orientations and colourways, and a variety of new tools and methods. What resulted is an incomparable body of work, where prints appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of colour and fluid forms.
Jane Findlay, Exhibition Curator and Head of Programme & Engagement at Dulwich Picture Gallery, said: “This is a truly special opportunity for visitors to get up close to Frankenthaler’s phenomenal works – all of which have never been shown before in this country – in the intimate spaces of Dulwich Picture Gallery. There is something magical about how she breathes life into such a rigid medium, retaining the energy and dynamism – that born at once feeling – that you see in her painting. And with her proofs and process explored alongside we’ll show the painstaking work behind these beguiling works – revealing just how accomplished Frankenthaler was in modulating control and spontaneity in her art.”
Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, Dulwich, SE21 7AD from 15th September – 18th April.