Frankenthaler: Revised and Expanded Edition

Frankenthaler completely reimagines John Elderfield’s landmark 1989 monograph, making it the most comprehensive book on the artist to date.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of American postwar abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, and her highly personal references to figuration and landscape.

This monograph is a revised and expanded edition of John Elderfield’s landmark monograph (Frankenthaler, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989) for the twenty-first century. It includes updated text throughout, along with a new chapter that covers work made post-1988. There are over 300 full-color reproductions of artworks by Frankenthaler, along with nearly 100 comparative illustrations and documentary photographs. As with the original book, this promises to be the definitive volume on Frankenthaler’s career, written by the leading expert on her oeuvre.

John Elderfield is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey. He has written major monographic exhibition catalogues on a number of artists, including Kurt Schwitters (1985), Henri Matisse (1992), and Willem de Kooning (2011).