Painting Collection

Helen Frankenthaler

Hurricane Flag

(1928–2011)
Hurricane Flag
1969
acrylic on canvas
120 1/4 x 106 5/8 x 1 3/4 in.

Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art
© 2018 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Corcoran Gallery of Art was one of the first private museums in the United States, established in 1869 by William Wilson Corcoran and expanded in 1880 to include the Corcoran College of Art and Design with the mission ‘dedicated to art and used solely for the purpose of encouraging the American genius.’ In 2014, the Corcoran transferred the college to the George Washington University and distributed the works from its Collection to museums and institutions in Washington, D.C.

Helen Frankenthaler’s Hurricane Flag is a recent addition to the Permanent Collection, arriving in 2018 along with several other works from the Corcoran Legacy Collection that was distributed to institutions across Washington. Measuring more than 10 feet high, the painting is a monumental example of Frankenthaler’s “stain-soak” technique. Frankenthaler made her paintings by first laying unprimed canvas on the floor—a method inspired by seeing Jackson Pollock’s work in the early 1950s in New York—and then creating large fields of color by pouring and applying paint often thinned with turpentine. Her abstract shapes, soaked into the raw surface, were frequently surrounded by areas of untouched canvas. Frankenthaler’s technique had a great impact on the artists of the Washington Color School, particularly Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland who visited her studio in 1953 at the behest of critic Clement Greenberg.

While her paintings were abstract, Frankenthaler often incorporated the colors and imagery of her surroundings into her work. Hurricane Flag was painted in the summer of 1969 while Frankenthaler was living in Provincetown, MA, with her husband, artist Robert Motherwell, and his two daughters. Hurricane Flag might reference the flags that were hung in Provincetown when a storm was coming, as recently recalled by Motherwell’s daughter Lise.