Original color screenprint on wove paper. Hand signed and numbered by the artist in pencil, “11/108 Frankenthaler” lower left and on the screen “Frankenthaler” lower right. An impression from the edition of 108 aside from 18 Arist’s proofs. Published by the Lincoln Center/ List Poster and Print Program, N.Y. In very fine condition.

Sheet size: 27 3/4” x 45 3/4”

Helen Frankenthaler is an Abstract Expressionist artist born in 1928 in New York City. She attended the Dalton School in New York where she studied with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied under abstract painter Paul Feeley. Frakenthaler became recognized in the New York art scene after befriending art and literary critic Clement Greenberg. It was Greenberg who introduced Frankenthaler to the action paintings of the Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock. She soon established her own style of work through her “color field” painting, in which large areas of color are blocked out using oil paint heavily diluted with turpentine or kerosene, ultimately creating a halo effect around each area of color.

Frakenthaler began experimenting with prints in the 1960s, around the same time other second-generation Abstract Expressionists were beginning to explore lithography. In 1961, Tatyana Grosman extended an invitation to Frankenthaler to work in her garage in West Lip, Long Island to make lithographs. Excluding a woodcut done years before as a Bennington undergraduate, Frankenthaler had no experience with printmaking media. While at first she was apprehensive of the technical process, she was determined to apply the ideas of gesture and spontaneity that had worked for her painting to her prints.

“Grey Fireworks” is an example of Frankenthaler’s variation of work in the year 1982. This year signaled a productive time in her sequences of pictures typified by multiple clumps of pigment, as seen in Grey Fireworks. This was done to produce the effect of simultaneously bursting points, yet this sequence was less radical than others of the same year.