This book was published on the occasion of Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 to 1959 at Gagosian, 522 West 21st Street, New York, the gallery’s first exhibition devoted to the artist. Curated by John Elderfield in cooperation with the Estate of Helen Frankenthaler, the major survey brought together almost thirty paintings, including rarely seen works from the estate and key works from public and private collections, including Painted on 21st Street (1950–51), the canvas from which the exhibition took its title; her celebrated breakthrough painting, Mountains and Sea (1952); and the expansive Before the Caves (1958), among many other key works. Together, they revealed new perspectives on Frankenthaler’s achievements in advancing midcentury painterly abstraction and expanding its affective range of subjects and influences.

The catalogue is fully illustrated with plates of the exhibited paintings and features Elderfield’s introductory essay, “The Pleasure of Not Knowing,” and a full chronology by Lauren Mahony that traces developments over this decade of Frankenthaler’s career accompanied by numerous archival photographs. It also includes reprints of historical essays on the artist by Frank O’Hara (written for the 1960 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York) and Carl Belz (written for the 1981 survey of works from the 1950s at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts).