Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
Slow, determined and infinitely hard-won, the woodcut prints of the late American artist transcend their rigid medium with visions of radiant liberation
The show of the season, if not the year, is a sequence of 36 visions of such overwhelming beauty at the Dulwich Picture Gallery that the urge is to remain there all day. It is like being surrounded by some ever-changing song. Ostensibly abstract, each work nonetheless touches on nature’s infinite sublime – snow pines and green glades, early spring and deep autumn, the curlicued complexities of late crab apples suspended in volumes of pale morning light.
Their soaring radiance is an abiding characteristic of the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), one of the great pioneers of American postwar abstraction. Yet a further astonishment, at Dulwich, is that these are not paintings at all; not canvases stain-soaked with her trademark colour washes, but something else entirely – formidably large woodcuts.