Georgia Museum of Art receives Helen Frankenthaler Foundation gift

The Georgia Museum of Art is a recipient of the Frankenthaler Prints Initiative, which supports education in visual arts and art history. The gift includes 22 prints by Helen Frankenthaler as well as a $25,000 grant to develop a program based on the works of art.

The museum aims to use this gift to reconsider Frankenthaler’s work and highlight how her relatively unknown experimental sculptural ceramics influenced her prints and paintings through an exhibition and publication. The prints include techniques like lithography, etching, screenprinting, aquatint and woodcut and date from 1967 to 1991. Several feature hand additions, and 12 are trial proofs for Frankenthaler’s “Bronze Smoke,” showing how the artist developed her ideas.

“The gift of prints allows us to look deeper into the legacy of Helen Frankenthaler and see the ways that her work is still resonating with contemporary artists and us today,” said Kathryn Hill, the museum’s associate curator of modern and contemporary art.

The initiative’s recipients are chosen due to their commitment to collecting prints and using them as teaching tools, something that the museum has focused on throughout its 75-year history. Every semester, dozens of University of Georgia classes use its collection, especially its works on paper, to study original works of art in person. The foundation’s mission is to support the visual arts through education and philanthropy.

The Frankenthaler Prints Initiative was launched in 2018. Nine exhibitions, three academic courses and four symposia resulted from the first round of the initiative. Other recipients of the initiative include the Block Museum of Art, Grey Art Gallery and Cantor Arts Center.

Frankenthaler was an American abstract painter known for her soak-stain technique and her unique approach to art. She said, “there are no rules … that is how art is born, that is how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules, that is what invention is about.”