Persian Garden 1966

Helen Frankenthaler made this print, ‘Persian Garden’, sometime in the mid-1960s. In it, a sunny, sandy ochre ink stain hovers, barely contained. Its edges bleed and drip; the color seems to bloom like watercolor, but grounded by that strong rectangle of dark green above. It is so interesting to see Frankenthaler in print. She made paintings, of course, with thin washes, soaking the canvas with color so that the image and the support became one. Here, though, the stain is more like a memory of a painting, a flattened, almost ghostly version of her approach. The surface has that slightly chalky quality of lithography and the marks are so immediate - look at the marbling at the top edge. It is hard to believe it came from a stone. It makes me think of Robert Motherwell's prints, especially the spare, open quality of his aquatints. There is something about the dialogue between painting and printmaking - a conversation that keeps shifting and changing our perspective.