What Red Lines Can Do

Helen Frankenthaler diverged from her peers in the Abstract Expressionist movement for her explicit use of landscape as the inspiration for her works. The terrain of upstate New York, the Long Island Sound, and the American Southwest inspired the simplified natural forms in her paintings and prints. Though it is not a naturalistic representation of a landscape, What Red Lines Can Do is suggestive of natural contours and broad open skies. Prioritizing intuition over intellect, she described her paintings as “filled with ideas about landscape, space, arrangement, perspective, repetition, flatness, light, all of which was translated and carried on in my own work and experiments.” -Sami Siegler (“Shifting Ground,” curated by undergraduate members of Cornell’s History of Art Majors’ Society, with oversight by Leah Sweet and Brittany R. R. Rubin, and presented at the Johnson Museum April 21-August 12, 2018)