"We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing"
About this Quote
The subtext is a defense of seriousness in a moment when her kind of work was easy to caricature. As a central figure in postwar American abstraction, Frankenthaler moved painting toward staining, soaking, letting pigment seep into unprimed canvas. To skeptics, that looked like accident; to her, it was control exercised through risk. When she names “size” alongside “drawing,” she’s quietly arguing that composition isn’t only line and form but bodily experience - what the canvas does to you at arm’s length, across a room, in a museum where scale becomes persuasion.
There’s another layer: “we would” hints at community, at studio talk and peer pressure. This isn’t solitary genius; it’s an ecosystem of looking, judging, revising. The intent is to normalize evaluation without killing mystery: keep the wonder, but interrogate the mechanics. In Frankenthaler’s world, feeling is real - and it’s engineered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Frankenthaler, Helen. (2026, January 17). We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-would-sift-through-every-inch-of-what-it-was-62680/
Chicago Style
Frankenthaler, Helen. "We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-would-sift-through-every-inch-of-what-it-was-62680/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-would-sift-through-every-inch-of-what-it-was-62680/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.
