Marcelyn McNeil: Works

Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988–2009 is the first book to explore the late period of Frankenthaler’s art and life.

Profusely illustrated with more than 95 plates and 40 archival images, the book features essays by Douglas Dreishpoon and Suzanne Boorsch; a roundtable discussion with Katharina Grosse, Pepe Karmel, and Mary Weatherford; an illustrated chronology and selected bibliography. Initiated by Dreishpoon, Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné and Chief Curator Emeritus at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the book complements an exhibition of Frankenthaler’s late paintings on paper and canvas organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and curated by Dreishpoon that premiered in 2021 at the New Britain Museum of American Art before traveling to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, and Artis—Naples/The Baker Museum.

Frankenthaler’s invention of the soak-stain technique expanded the possibilities of abstract painting with references to figuration and landscape. In later years, her practice continued to evolve through the use of diverse media and processes, as she shifted from painting canvas on the floor to using larger sheets of paper that were laid out on the floor or on table tops for easier accessibility. The continuity between the late work and what came before is striking, as the painter, graced with a vast art-historical image bank, and technical prowess, moved in whatever direction suited her mood and imagination. 

Ted Larsen: Works 2007-2023 is the first monograph for the visual artist, bringing together over fifteen years of creative output. As contributor David Pagel notes, Larsen’s sculptural works are not easily categorized and often “behave like abstract paintings.” Since 2001, Larsen has sought alternative and salvaged materials in his abstract constructions with the “hope of bringing purist shapes and surfaces back down to earth.” This quest takes Larsen to sites like the metal scrapyard, where he mines the raw material for his work by sawing off sections of older-model vehicles. The works’ surfaces, which hold a particular patinated palette, are unmodified; the colors of the metal that skin the objects—the rusty off-white of an old pickup truck or the vibrant yellow of a decommissioned school bus—are exactly as he found them.

Calling to mind both architecture and the reductive forms associated with the Minimalists of the 1960s and 1970s, Larsen’s works upend and defy classification by embracing experimentation, the spontaneous gesture, and the hybrid, while undermining the idea of Modernist purity.

Dorothy Fratt was published in conjunction with the first major US museum exhibition on the prolific, yet underrecognized, American painter Dorothy Fratt (1923–2017). Born in Washington, DC, and associated with the Washington Color School in the early 1950s, Fratt moved to Arizona in 1958 and would go on to forge her own style of abstraction more closely tied to the Southwest United States. Although Fratt’s paintings are often classified as color field and Abstract Expressionist, her use of color and expression of her surroundings evolved into a prolific body of work that idiosyncratically emotes landscape, atmosphere, gesture, and mood on her own terms.

Spanning five decades of the artist’s oeuvre, Dorothy Fratt includes a selection of foundational early works alongside numerous paintings that exemplify Fratt’s vibrant and distinct style of abstraction. The book also features an extended biography, ephemera from Fratt’s life, and a conversation with contemporary artists Teresa Baker, Caroline Kent, and Rebecca Ward.

…a well-overdue retrospective, considering every point of DeLap’s career, including a large section dedicated to his unheralded, surprisingly expressive drawings.

— Jessica Holmes, The Brooklyn Rail

A legendary figure in Californian art, Tony DeLap was associated with Los Angeles’ 1960s Finish Fetish school (alongside the likes of Craig Kaufman and Larry Bell), and was a mentor to some of California’s most notable artists, including Bruce Nauman, James Turrell and John McCracken, who all studied with him. 

Where many artists of the Finish Fetish school eschewed the material facture of their works, DeLap has almost always chosen to construct his work himself, meticulously producing freestanding sculptures in aluminum, fiberglass, lacquer, Plexiglas, resin and molded plastics and fabrics. He followed a path of Geometric abstraction and Minimal art embracing the principles of limited color, geometry, precise craftsmanship, and intellectual rigor. 

DeLap was included in the two shows that helped to define the Minimalist movement—Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (1966) and American Sculpture of the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967)—and his work brilliantly merges the austerity of Minimalism with Op art illusionism.

This book is a survey of DeLap’s long and productive career.