Helen Frankenthaler Chairman of the Board Framed Poster

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter who was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. This poster features a reproduction of Frankenthaler’s 1971 artwork Chairman of the Board, which is represented in MoMA’s collection. The poster is framed with a maple wood frame and measures 16.75h x 37”w.

The original artwork features a river of raw canvas that cuts across a vast expanse of orange. “I frequently leave areas of raw, unprimed canvas unpainted,” Frankenthaler has said. “That ‘negative’ space has just as active a role as the ‘positive’ painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.” In this work, the artist experimented with different ways to produce line: the thin, spindly black lines that radiate from the central cluster of shapes are drawn, but she also used color to create line, as the edges of the orange paint demonstrate. In these subtle manipulations of line, color, and canvas, Chairman of the Board is a meditation on the formal qualities of painting itself.