With a single shape suspended within an unprimed, unpainted, square canvas, Commune represents a radically reduced approach to abstraction. Frankenthaler painted it in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she spent summers for more than a decade. "In the late '60s I wanted to try my hand at more geometric shapes than I had been painting previously," she explained. With its bleeding edges and subtle variations, however, this shape is neither crisply delineated nor uniformly flat.
