Oil painting entitled 'Abstract Composition' by Helen Frankenthaler (b.1928). American School, ca. 1964.

Oil wash painting titled 'Abstract composition', signed 'Frankenthaler.'

Purchased, 1964

Historical significance: Helen Frankenthaler (b.1928) is an American painter and printmaker whose work is associated with Abstract Expressionism. Like Jackson Pollock, she experimented with methods of painting on unprimed canvases. She often worked with thin pigments, which she allowed to soak directly into the canvas, thus exploring the interface between image and surface.

Frankenthaler's work often investigates ideas of depth and perspective. In this work of around 1964 the green passages seem to form a border, within which the viewer sees an area of pale pink wash with darker abstract marks in its centre. However, even as we seem to be invited to look 'into' the painting through this portal, our attempt to do this is thwarted by the bold, painterly brush strokes which articulate and draw attention to its surface qualities.

Although it has been the museum's policy since the foundation of the Tate Gallery to restrict its acquisition of oil paintings to those with direct bearing on the decorative or applied arts, this painting seems to have been acquired as a wash drawing. In the annual accessions report for 1964, Graham Reynolds, Keeper of Prints & Drawings and Paintings, described this acquisition as follows: 'Of recent years it has been the policy of the Department of Paintings to acquire a small but carefully selected number of modern foreign watercolours or cognate drawings. These are hung in rotation with the modern British watercolours […] and this juxtaposition helps to put the development and achievement of the national school in its proper perspective. The most important purchases made during 1964 by the Department were of this nature. […] A more recent phase of American art, generally labelled Abstract Expressionism, is seen in Helen Frankenthaler's composition in oil wash.' (Graham Reynolds, Department of Prints and Drawings and Department of Paintings: Accessions 1964, p. iii.)

P.14-1964