Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928–2011) began printmaking in 1961, working across lithography, woodcut, and etching for the next fifty years. Frankenthaler is known for her abstract paintings and especially her signature “soak-stain” technique—allowing paint to sit, spread, and pool on untreated canvas. She brought this same sensibility, what she described as a “pouring, flooding, spilling, bleeding one,” to works on paper.

While printmaking is often characterized by precision and control, Frankenthaler’s prints allow for chance encounters between pigment and surface—unintentional effects that emphasize the agency and alchemy of materials. The exhibition will focus on her print practice and call attention to the unpredictability, chance, and accident in Frankenthaler’s work.

The exhibition will include works by other artists in The Block’s collection who similarly have embraced chance, accident, or aesthetic surprise in their artworks. It will bring together a sampling of lithographs, drawings, and watercolors by Frankenthaler’s friends and colleagues—Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Robert Motherwell—and many other artists from The Block’s permanent collection.

In 2023, The Block Museum was one of ten university museums to receive artwork as part of the Frankenthaler Print Initiative. The exhibition will feature this extraordinary gift and bring it into conversation with prints in the collection.

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Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper is curated by Stephanie S.E. Lee, 2024–25 Art History Graduate Fellow and Corinne Granof, Academic Curator, at The Block Museum of Art. Generous support for the exhibition was provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The exhibition is supported in part by The Alumnae of Northwestern University. The Graduate Fellow is generously supported by The Graduate School (TGS), Northwestern University.