Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011) began printmaking in 1961, working across lithography, woodcut, and etching for the next fifty years. Frankenthaler is known for her abstract paintings and especially her signature “soak-stain” technique—allowing paint to sit, spread, and pool on untreated canvas. She brought this same sensibility, what she described as a “pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding one,” to works on paper.
While printmaking is often characterized by precision and control, Frankenthaler’s prints allow for chance encounters between pigment and surface—unintentional effects that emphasize the agency and alchemy of materials. The exhibition will focus on her print practice and call attention to the unpredictability, chance, and accident in Frankenthaler’s work.
The exhibition will include works by other artists in The Block’s collection who similarly have embraced chance, accident, or aesthetic surprise in their artworks. It will bring together a sampling of lithographs, drawings, and watercolors by Frankenthaler’s friends and colleagues—Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Robert Motherwell—and many other artists from The Block’s permanent collection.
In 2023, The Block Museum was one of ten university museums to receive artwork as part of the Frankenthaler Print Initiative. The exhibition will feature this extraordinary gift and bring it into conversation with prints in the collection.
Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper is curated by Stephanie Lee, 2024–25 Art History Graduate Fellow and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, at The Block Museum of Art. Generous support for the exhibition was provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
Image: Helen Frankenthaler, Altitudes, 1978. Lithograph on paper, 22 × 31 in. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. 22 1/4 x 30 5/8 inches (56.5 x 77.8 cm) © 2024 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), West Islip, New York Photograph by Thomas Barratt, courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York
About the Frankenthaler Prints Initiative
The Frankenthaler Prints Initiative is an ongoing program that confers a set of ten prints and five to ten related trial proofs by Helen Frankenthaler to a university art museum. Each recipient also receives a one-time grant of to develop a project or program for the study, presentation, and interpretation of the editions and proofs within a three-year timeframe. Since its launch in 2018, the Initiative has amplified Helen Frankenthaler’s legacy as both a leading American abstract painter of the twentieth century and an outspoken advocate for arts education. It has enriched academic institutions’ collections and promoted research into Frankenthaler’s innovative contributions to the field of printmaking. To date, the Initiative has supported twenty university-affiliated museums across the United States. It reflects the Foundation’s commitment to fostering undergraduate and graduate education in the visual arts and art history.