Helen Frankenthaler, For E.M., 1981, Acrylic on canvas, 71 ¼ x 115 ¼ in. (181 x 292.7 cm), Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. © 2016 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./ARSNY
In this work, American abstractionist Helen Frankenthaler takes on the art of the past. With For E.M., the artist pays homage to French 19th-century painter Édouard Manet, reinterpreting his Still Life With Carp (1864). While keeping close to Manet’s overall tonality and relational palette, she intensifies her predecessor’s inky blacks and materializes the appearance of light itself. Detail is intentionally sloughed off, giving deepened significance to passages of painterly incident. The sensation of “object-ness” is strongly evoked, but then becomes mere memory, lost in the scumbled, stained support of the canvas. In linking herself to Manet and pushing the explicit material conditions and flatness of his practice, Frankenthaler insists upon her own place within the art historical continuum.