The show’s theme seems simple at first: really big paintings.
To be a bit more specific, paintings measuring at least 100 inches in one dimension or another (or both!), made between 1960 and 1992 by Helen Frankenthaler, one of the all-time greats in American abstract art.
But the 22 works in “Helen Frankenthaler: The Moment and the Distance,” which opened last week at Gagosian’s West 21st Street gallery in New York, are not just heroic in scale. They trace the artist’s personal and stylistic evolutions across four decades, starting several years after she invented her famed “soak-stain” method and moving through periods of dreamlike washes, weightier palettes, and built-up surfaces.
“She tended to be pretty experimental as she went along,” says Elizabeth Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. To highlight the effects of such experiments, the Gagosian show is hung chronologically—the first time that Jason Ysenburg, a director at the gallery, has done so in the 10 Frankenthaler shows he’s organized over the years.
The earliest two works, Alassio (1960) and Provincetown I (1961), were each made with oil-based paint and leave a large swath of canvas raw. They have the clearest connection back to 1952’s Mountains and Sea, the first painting to employ her soak-stain technique of pouring thinned oil paint directly onto unprimed canvas—a method that went on to influence a whole generation of abstract painters and which paved the way for the color field movement.
One of my favorite little quirks in the show is the stitched detailing along the right edge of Alassio. The fabric’s original purpose was likely not for art—it might have been a bedspread or a tablecloth. The painting would have been started as Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, the Abstract Expressionist painter to whom she was married from 1958 to 1971, were traveling in Italy. She was on the move and used what she could find.
Helen Frankenthaler, Alsasio, 1960, oil on linen, 85 ¼ x 131 in.© 2026 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy of Gagosian
There are other surprises in store for even the most devout Frankenthaler fans. “We wanted to do an ambitious show that hadn’t been seen before, of works that have been very often tucked away,” says Ysenburg. Several of the paintings have seldom, if ever, been on display to the public, as Frankenthaler kept many of her favorites for herself at home or in storage, even up until her death in 2011, at age 83.
