Helen Frankenthaler Returns to MoMA with Monumental Fall 2025 Installation
July 29th, 2025 – This fall, the Museum of Modern Art reintroduces audiences to the breadth and force of Helen Frankenthaler’s legacy with Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep, a focused installation opening October 25, 2025, and running through February 8, 2026. Set in MoMA’s soaring Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, the exhibition assembles key works from the museum’s collection that span more than three decades of Frankenthaler’s groundbreaking career.
Organized by Samantha Friedman, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, with Elizabeth Wickham, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, the presentation arrives as a rare opportunity to engage deeply with one of postwar American painting’s most influential figures. It also marks Frankenthaler’s first dedicated exhibition at MoMA since her 1989 retrospective.
“The scale of the Marron Atrium allows us to foreground the ambition that defined Frankenthaler’s work. This focused group of key works from MoMA’s collection traces the arc of her painting practice, highlighting key moments within her continual innovation.”
Samantha Friedman, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art
A Legacy of Innovation and Scale
Frankenthaler’s work helped to define a new direction in American abstraction, and this installation captures the shifts and strides that shaped her visual language. Ranging from the 1950s through the 1980s, A Grand Sweep is anchored by Toward Dark (1988), a recent acquisition gifted by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. With its atmospheric complexity and lyrical energy, the painting exemplifies the expressive and gestural command that distinguished her later period.
Other standout works include Jacob’s Ladder (1957), in which Frankenthaler reflects on spiritual ascent and formal experimentation. Inspired by José de Ribera’s Jacob’s Dream (1639), the painting, according to the artist, developed “into shapes symbolic of an exuberant figure and ladder.” Decades later, Chairman of the Board (1971) arrives with assertive scale and structural authority.
Frankenthaler once remarked:
“It was about a grand sweep. I had the basic idea in my head—I knew how the lines would dance in. I felt sure of myself.”
Helen Frankenthaler, Leading Figure of American Postwar Painting
Together, these works offer not just a visual timeline but a meditation on the rhythm, restraint, and radical curiosity that defined her practice.
A Singular Setting for a Singular Vision
The Marron Atrium, one of MoMA’s most architecturally commanding spaces, becomes both a canvas and stage for Frankenthaler’s ideas. The exhibition’s immersive scale and open sightlines emphasize her fearless approach to form, inviting visitors to reconsider the magnitude of her influence—not only within the canon of Abstract Expressionism but in shaping the possibilities of painting itself.
This installation also affirms MoMA’s longstanding relationship with the artist, whose work has been a critical part of its collection and narrative of postwar art history.
Exhibition Support and Digital Access
The presentation is supported by MoMA’s Annual Exhibition Fund, with leadership contributions from a robust group of philanthropists and foundations, including Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and The Sundheim Family Foundation, among others. Visitors can also engage with the exhibition through the Bloomberg Connects digital experience, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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