TOM LOONAN
There’s nothing like a little bit of catalogue raisonné news to lift one’s spirits, with the promise it offers of intense scholarship on an artist’s complete works and a luxurious tome devoted to the same. And so it is with not a little excitement that I share that the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has tapped Douglas Dreishpoon to be director and editor of a Helen Frankenthaler catalogue raisonné.
Dreishpoon, the chief curator emeritus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (soon to be the Albright-Knox-Gundlach Art Museum) in Buffalo, New York, will begin in March on the endeavor, which will research her paintings, drawings, and other mediums, and result in a catalogue available in both print and digital forms. (A catalogue of the prints of the artist, who died in 2011, was published in 1996, and an addendum is on the way.)
“The opportunity to assume this responsible position with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, to initiate and oversee the catalogue raisonné project, is thrilling,” Dreishpoon said in a statement released to press. At the Albright-Knox he organized “Giving Up One’s Mark: Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Those looking for a taste of Frankenthaler right now can head to Haus der Kunst in Munich, where her work is included in the exhibition “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965,” or visit a fine bookstore to pick up Line into Color, Color into Line: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings 1962–1987, the catalogue for a 2016 show of the same name in Beverly Hills at Gagosian, which now reps the Frankenthaler estate.