Helen Frankenthaler
American, 1928–2011
Chairman of the Board, 1971
Acrylic and felt-tip pen on canvas
“Big sweep; big scale,” Frankenthaler declared about this painting, her second largest at the time that she made it. She referred to the negative space of raw canvas cutting through the orange, horizontal expanse as a “crevice/cable,” as if it were at once a fissure and a cord. Describing the lines that “bridge the gap” literally—from the outside to the inside of the crevice,” the artist noted that they “were made all at once, in one fell swoop.”
