Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool was born in 1955 in Boston. In 1967 Wool studied photography at University High School in Chicago. In 1972 he studied painting with Richard Pousette-Dart at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. In 1973 he moved to New York City and enrolled in the Studio School where he studied with Jack Tworkov and Harry Kramer. In 1980 Wool became a studio assistant to Joel Shapiro part-time for following four years.

Wool’s first exhibition was held in 1984 at Clarissa Dalrymple and Nicole Klagsbrun's Cable Gallery. Also in 1984 he produced first book – a photocopied edition of four: 93 Drawings of Beer on the Wall. Two years later, Wool started producing his first pattern paintings, and in 1987 he joins the Luhring Augustine Gallery. 1987 saw Wool’s first ‘word paintings.'

In 1988 he had his first European shows in Cologne and Athens. The following year in 1989 he exhibited at Museum Group shows in Amsterdam, Frankfurt am Main, and Munich, as well at the Whitney Biennial. In the same year he took a one-year fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. 1989 also saw the publication of Black Book, an oversized collection of 9-letter images, and the first retrospective of his work mounted at Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. His book Cats in Bag Bags in River was published to coincide with the show. In 1992 Wool undertook a DAAD residency in Berlin. Absent Without Leave was published in 1993: 160 black-and-white images from travel photographs taken over the previous 4 years. In 1998 the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles mounted a mid-career retrospective of Wool’s work. Christopher Wool lives and works in New York and Marfa, Texas.

I'm afraid I don't have dates for many of Wool's artworks shown here, so they won't be in strict chronological order.

1990 Trouble 
enamel on aluminium

1991 Untitled 
alkyd on aluminium

1995 Untitled 
enamel on aluminium

1996 Untitled 
enamel on aluminium

2000 Untitled 
alkyd and silkscreen on rice paper

2000 Untitled 
enamel on aluminium

2001 Untitled 
silkscreen ink and enamel on linen

2001 Untitled 
silkscreen on linen

2006 Untitled 
enamel on linen

2006 Untitled 
silkscreen ink on paper

2006 Untitled 
silkscreen ink on paper

2007 Untitled 
enamel on linen

2007 Untitled 
enamel on linen

2007 Untitled silkscreen on paper

2009 Untitled 
silkscreen ink on linen

 2010 Untitled
silkscreen ink on linen

Riot

Run

Helen Frankenthaler - part 2

This is part two of two-part post on the works of Helen Frankenthaler. For more works and biographical information, see part one below. This second part includes some of Frankenthaler's prints, a medium she took up relatively late.

Painting was Frankenthaler’s primary artistic passion, but an obsession to push her creative limits led her to turn her attention to print media. Frankenthaler created her first prints in 1961 with Tatyana Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions in West Islip, Long Island. It was in this intimate lithographic workshop, where artists were treated as personal guests and for whom Grosman would go to any lengths to facilitate artistic needs, that Frankenthaler began to experiment with print media.

While Frankenthaler created her first woodcuts at ULAE it was not until 1976, when she commenced collaboration with master printer Kenneth Tyler, that she began a sustained investigation of the woodcut medium. Frankenthaler’s first woodcut with Tyler was Essence mulberry, produced in 1977.

1977 Essence mulberry 
woodcut

Essence mulberry is seen today as a watershed, the first of Frankenthaler’s woodcuts to employ the traditionally graphic medium in the production of an image of abstracted and inspired beauty.
In the thirty-plus years that have passed since the creation of Essence mulberry Frankenthaler has worked with Tyler Graphics in a collaboration that has dramatically shifted the parameters of the woodcut. Frankenthaler’s experimental nature drove her to use paper pulp as a support for her woodcut Freefall in 1993 and hand-dyed paper for Radius, 1993. The artist experimented with the combination of woodcut and other print techniques such as lithography in All about blue, 1994 and etching and aquatint in Ariel, 1996.

Kenneth Tyler has recalled that with the Tales of Genji, a series of six woodcut prints that Frankenthaler began in 1995, ‘It was apparent from the beginning that what was needed was a new approach and technique for making what Helen strove for: a woodcut with painterly resonance.’ With this in mind, Tyler suggested to Frankenthaler that she could communicate to the workshop of printers and more importantly, remain true to her unique style by painting her ideas for the printed works onto pieces of wood.

Supplied with wood, paint and brushes, Frankenthaler worked alone in the artist’s studio at Tyler Graphics painting the maquettes for the Tales of Genji. From the painted studies, tracings were made and woodblocks were carved by the ukiyo-e trained Japanese carver, Yasuyuki Shibata. The watery nature of Frankenthaler’s paintings created an immediate problem for printing. In order to create the lush transparent washes of colour, the printers had to work quickly with wet sheets of paper that, under the pressure of the printing press, would force the inks to bleed and blend into one another. Through trial and error and laborious proofing sessions, the workshop gradually overcame these technical difficulties.

In Madame Butterfly, 2000, we see Frankenthaler’s impulsive soak-stain painting technique realised in the most graphic of print media. The ‘spontaneous print’ that Frankenthaler has pursued throughout her print career has finally been achieved. Not only has she managed to push beyond everything that she had previously created in the woodcut medium, but technically, the work has moved into territory that shows the Tyler Graphics workshop at its finest. Madame Butterfly is a virtuoso display of 102 colours, printed from forty-six woodblocks, in a work spanning three panels of paper and measuring over two metres in length.

2000 Madame Butterfly

One of the 46 woodblocks used to create Madame Butterfly

Once again, the artist communicated her ideas to the technicians of the print workshop by painting on three pieces of specially selected wood. Paper was skilfully handmade by Tyler Graphics to resemble both the texture and look of the wood grain. The woodblocks used to print the image were carved by Frankenthaler and Yasuyuki Shibata. Frankenthaler marked the wood using her ‘guzzying’ technique, a technique involving scratching the wood with items including sandpaper and dental tools. Frankenthaler was determined to ensure that her wrist, and thus her unique sensibility, be evident in every aspect of the print’s creation, just as it is in her paintings.

1987 Yellow Jack 
lithograph

1987-8 Plaze Real No 13/60 
etching

1988 High Spirits

1992 Black Frame #1 
acrylic

1993 Freefall 
woodcut

1993 Radius 
woodcut

1994 Untitled 
acrylic

1994 All about blue 
lithograph

1995 Adobe 
acrylic

1995 Reflections IX 
lithograph

1995 Russet 
acrylic

1996 Ariel 
etching and aquatint

1998 Tales of Genji I 
woodcut

1998 Tales of Genji II 
woodcut

1998 Tales of Genji III 
woodcut

2000 Grey Fireworks 
silkscreen

2002 Contentment Island 
silkscreen

2004 Snow Pines 
woodcut

2005 Southern Exposure 
silkscreen

2009 Aerie 
silkscreen

Helen Frankenthaler - part 1

This is part one of a two-part post on the works of Helen Frankenthaler, abstract expressionist painter, and one-time wife of Robert Motherwell. Frankenthaler was born in New York in 1928. In 1945 she graduated from the Dalton School, where she studied with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. She later studied with Paul Feeley at Bennington College in Vermont, where she absorbed the visual language of Cubism and the formal structures of Old Master painting. After graduating in 1949, and having received a substantial inheritance, she studied privately with Hans Hofmann in 1950 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then returned to New York to paint full-time. Later that year while organising an exhibition at the Jacques Seligmann gallery, she met Clement Greenberg, through whom she would meet some of the central figures of the New York School, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith.

An exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler was focused on analysing and reproducing natural forms, as is apparent in Mountains and Sea (1952). Measuring approximately 3 metres wide and 2 metres high, Mountains and Sea matches the ambitious scale and gestural handling associated with the New York School, but Frankenthaler's method of paint application was markedly original: she thinned the oil paint to the consistency of watercolour so that it would soak into and stain the canvas rather than accumulate on its surface.

1952 Mountains and Sea 
oil

Inspired by Pollock's drip style, her soak-in technique resulted in fresh, appealing expanses of colour that spurred similar experiments by Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (whom Greenberg took to Frankenthaler's studio in 1953) and prefigured Colour Field painting of the later 1950s and 1960s by Louis, Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frankenthaler herself.

In 1958 Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell. At about the same time she began experimenting with the relationship between fine lines and small, sun-like shapes. In the early 1960s she started producing paintings featuring a single stain or blot; she also began to use acrylic paint to create richly coloured canvases, such as Cape (Provincetown) (1964).

1964 Cape, Provincetown

Frankenthaler and Motherwell divorced in 1971, and several years later she bought a second home and studio in Connecticut, where she ventured into the production of welded-steel sculptures, prints, and illustrated books. Further experiments with other mediums led her to design the sets and costumes for a production by England's Royal Ballet in 1985. Frankenthaler continued to focus on painting throughout this period, and maintains her painting practice to the present day.

Frankenthaler has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and New York universities. Her first solo exhibition took place at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, in the autumn of 1951. Numerous solo exhibitions of her work have followed, including retrospectives at the Jewish Museum, New York (1960); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969); Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (1980); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1985); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989).

Her many awards include First Prize for Painting at the first Paris Biennial (1959); Joseph E. Temple Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1968); New York City Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture (1986); and Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, College Art Association (1994). Frankenthaler lives and works in New York and Darien, Connecticut.

1958 Before the Caves

1961 Summerscene, Provincetown

1963 Blue Atmosphere

1964 Interior Landscape

1964 Magic Carpet

1967-70 Connected by Joy 
etching and aquatint

1971 Spanning

1972 Green Nest

1974 Robinson's Wrap 
acrylic

1976 Desert Pass

1979 Viewpoint II

1981 A Green Thought in a Green Shade

1984 Covent Garden Study 
acrylic

1984 Quattrocento 
acrylic

Untitled 
acrylic

1987 Broome Street at Night 
etching and aquatint

1987 Seeing the Moon on a Hot Summer Day 
acrylic