Helen Frankenthaler, “Persia” (1978)
Persia (1978) is one of Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpieces. Frankenthaler is an American Abstract Expressionist painter. She belongs to the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and becomes a key figure in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting.
Persia is an immersive landscape of pink, peach, yellow, and red. It suggests dynamic and chromatic intensity.
Helen Frankenthaler aims not to make a realistic depiction of reality, instead makes people associate and feel many things when watching her painting. Her painting is, in her own words, “not nature per se, but a feeling”.
As a part of abstract expressionism, Frankenthaler’s work is characterized by its unique brush-strokes and spontaneity. Abstract expressionism was inspired by the surrealist’s idea that the source of art is the unconscious mind.
Persia (1978) was painted in momentous changes in Helen Frankenthaler’s life, from closing her studio after a decade of working there, divorce to great success in her career as a painter. Regardless of these dramatic events in her life, she remains an abstract expressionist painter who offers, as Barbara Rose says, “great intensity and significance about what it is to stay alive, to face crisis and survive”.
Frankenthaler’s Persia teaches us how to maintain strength and flexibility amidst the changes and crises.
Helen Frankenthaler
