The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presents Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep, an exhibition project that brings together some of the American artist’s most significant works, installed in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Atrium. Marron. Scheduled to run from Oct. 25, 2025 to Feb. 8, 2026, the exhibition draws inspiration from Frankenthaler’s extraordinary collection of paintings held by the museum. With works spanning more than three decades, this is the first monographic exhibition dedicated to her by MoMA since the 1989 retrospective.
Curated by Samantha Friedman, of the Department of Drawings and Prints, with Elizabeth Wickham, assistant curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, the exhibition aims to restore the breadth and coherence of Frankenthaler’s creative journey. “The scale of Marron Atrium allows us to foreground the ambition that defined Frankenthaler’s work,” Friedman said. “This group of key works from MoMA’s collection traces the arc of his painting practice, highlighting key moments of his continuing innovation.”
The selection spans the 1950s to the 1980s and offers a concise but incisive reading of Frankenthaler’srevolutionary contribution to post-World War II American painting. At the center of the exhibition is Toward Dark (1988), one of the museum’s most recent acquisitions, donated by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The work, intense and full of expressive tension, embodies the artist’s stylistic maturity and bold compositional vision.
Paintings made in earlier decades set the stage for this late masterpiece. Among the works on view is Jacob’s Ladder (1957), which the artist described as a symbolic synthesis of figure and ladder, inspired by Jusepe de Ribera’s Jacob’s Dream (1639), preserved at the Prado Museum. Also present was Chairman of the Board (1971), a work that testifies to her full creative confidence and ability to conceive large-scale compositions. For her, this painting “represented a great work.... I had the basic idea in my head: I knew how the lines would move. I was confident.”
This installation is intended to offer visitors an immersion into the depth, transformation, and lasting impact of Frankenthaler’s visual language. With this project, MoMA pays tribute to the breadth of his vision and the expressive power that made his work an indispensable landmark in twentieth-century art, inviting the public to rediscover it in one of the museum’s most scenic spaces.
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| New York's MoMA devotes a monographic exhibition to Helen Frankenthaler with works spanning more than 30 years |
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