Helen Frankenthaler, Crusades, 1976

Helen Frankenthaler once described the act of painting as having “the landscape in my arms [when] I painted it.” I like to think this is what we see in Crusades, a giant orange abyss that immerses you from the top to the bottom. Oranges are interspersed with greens, and the reds subtly and silently sail throughout the canvas.

Frankenthaler gives us an education in looking. She tests our vision and the shapes and forms that we might be witnessing. As I stand in front of this work, I ask myself: Am I looking at something from afar . . . or at the minutiae of something up close . . . and, from what angle?

I like to look at this painting as though I have my back to the floor, looking up to the sky on a blazing hot day in California. My eyes sore from aftervision — when you’ve been looking at sunlight for too long and everything is tainted with that glowing orange color. That red mark on the lower right-hand side is just about visible, as if subbing in for a plane cruising through the sky, leaving behind a glimmer of its contrails.

Or, flip it, and it’s as if I am on that plane, looking down onto a desert flooded with dry arid colors. It’s known that she made this work after a visit to Arizona.

Helen Frankenthaler was born in 1928 and raised in New York City. She was taught by the great Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo and, in the early 1950s, joined the Abstract Expressionists in Downtown Manhattan. It’s a style known for both heavy, action-like brushstrokes and calming fields of color, and Frankenthaler carved out her own language. She called this her “soak-stain” technique. She removed the canvas from the easel and placed it on the floor, thinned down oil paint, and poured and brushed it onto raw canvas, creating surfaces flooded with spontaneous, multilayered shapes and forms.

As Frankenthaler stated, “What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is — did I make a beautiful picture?” Frakenthaler’s works are an invitation to see what we want in them, immerse ourselves in color, and feel transported to wherever they might take us.