Helen Frankenthaler

In 2002, I wrote to [Frankenthaler’s] home on Contentment Island in Darien, Connecticut, and to her gallery in New York City, requesting an interview. She denied my request, explaining in a three-sentence letter that the painting’s title may only have suggested to her a feeling of “turbulence.” -George M. Goodwin, “Wrestling with Frankenthaler: Her Painting in the RISD Museum”

The meanings of an abstract work will depend on its materiality, its situation, the processes of its making, its composition, its title, its symbolic suggestions and counter-suggestions, its context in a discussion of abstraction, and in the artist’s work. In other words, the way in which a work of abstract art generates meaning can be extremely complicated. Considered in this way, it might seem entirely possible that an abstract work can represent the Holocaust in complex ways.

-Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust