Helen Frankenthaler’s Paraphrase Paintings
April 13, 2026
These borrowings raise the issue about what she marks as her own, and what she tells us comes from others. Beginning in a work like the 1951 Sightseers, in which she wrote her name—and continuing in abstract paintings with the self-inscription of the artist’s moving hand—the sense of her-painting-herself is echoed in some paraphrases of Old Master paintings, including her first, the 1956 Venus and the Mirror.