How a picture works best for me involves how much working false space it has in depth. . . . whether it be a Cubist Picasso or Braque or a Noland stripe painting—it’s a play of ambiguities.

—Helen Frankenthaler

One of the most influential American artists to emerge during the mid-twentieth century, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) is best known for her innovative abstract paintings in which she poured washes of color over great expanses of raw canvas. Beginning in 1961, printmaking also became an integral part of her practice, and she went on to become the most prolific printmaker of her generation. Frankenthaler’s print work is remarkable for the diversity of techniques she employed, the number of studios with which she collaborated, and the ways in which her engagement with printmaking was simultaneously independent from and in sync with her practice as a painter. Throughout her printmaking career she continued to demonstrate her facility for foregrounding the natural properties of the media—stone, metal, wood, paper, and ink—just as she had done so radically with paint and canvas.

Frankenthaler began making prints at the urging of her friends the poet Frank O’Hara and fellow painter Grace Hartigan, two of the first creative figures to collaborate with Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in New York on prints and limited-edition artists’ books. Frankenthaler’s artistic career had taken off in the 1950s, a period in which the seeds of an American printmaking renaissance were also planted. The florescence of fine art printmaking at midcentury resulted from the tightly intertwined bonds between master print technicians and the postwar artists, writers, and critics of the densely interconnected New York art world.

This exhibition takes its subtitle from Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), an iconic essay by the literary critic William Empson (1906–1984), which articulated the ways that formal structures of language could convey a multiplicity of meanings in poetry. For the postwar American avantgarde, Empson’s essay was not only the foundational work for the literary theory movement known as New Criticism but also highly influential for abstract artists. In 1957 Frankenthaler borrowed the essay’s title for her large painting Seven Types of Ambiguity, which will be on view at the start of the exhibition, making clear the artist’s own affinity for Empson’s work. Variously focusing on Frankenthaler’s compositional language, working process, historical referents, and collaborations with particular printmaking studios, the seven loosely chronological sections of the exhibition embrace the central principle of Empson’s text: that close reading, like close looking, can yield deep relationships with an abstract composition.