Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1980. Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
Philanthropist and collector Olive McCollum Jenney (1929—2024) was a major contributor to Houston’s cultural legacy, whose lifelong engagement with the city’s institutions continues through exhibitions and programs made possible by the Olive McCollum Jenney Fund. Along with her husband, the renowned architect Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr. (1915—1987), Jenney was a champion of modern and contemporary art, making significant acquisitions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and provided generous support for exhibitions at The Menil Collection, as well as funding and advising for the Houston Grand Opera and Baylor School of Medicine, where she was a Board member. Neuhaus chaired the Texas Commission on the Arts, alongside serving as a trustee of the Contemporary Arts Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. This public engagement was complemented by their personal collection, which Jenney often opened to artists and students as an extension of her belief in a civic discourse between art and its creators, collectors, curators, and the city’s diverse voices. This thoughtfulness and commitment to open, direct dialogue is reflected in three remarkable works on offer in Phillips’ July Modern & Contemporary Art Sale – each an example of Jenney’s work to beckon Houston as an inclusive destination for art and the global artists she promoted as representatives of that dynamic vision.
Olive McCollum Jenney in 2017.
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1980. Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
Held in the family collection since the 1980s and exhibited only once, Untitled (1980) emerges as a rare and powerful example of Helen Frankenthaler’s relentless exploration of material and medium. After her early breakthroughs – including pioneering the “soak-stain” technique in the early 1950s, a defining innovation of the Color Field movement – the artist never confined herself to a single method. Instead, Frankenthaler embraced a fluid and expansive approach, shifting frequently among an array of techniques, and constantly reimagining the relationships that arise from pigment, surface, and scale. This process unfolded more like a dialogue than a progression: Frankenthaler would often return to and tinker with earlier discoveries by layering them with new gestures.
By 1980, Frankenthaler blended continuity and change in ways that would come to define her practice for the following decade. The reserved palette and gentle watercolor brushwork in Untitled combine with gouache and the paper support in a way that retains the artist’s signature vibrancy while continuing to push the limits of compositional structure. The washes of color are layered with tighter control in a smaller scale, creating an interplay between imminence and distance that simultaneously frames the work and gives it extraordinary depth.
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell, The Irish Troubles, 1977-81. Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
Robert Motherwell’s The Irish Troubles (1977—81) is a deeply meditative expression of historical tragedy and abstraction’s capacity to impact us on a visceral level. Created in response to the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, the work extends Motherwell’s recurring themes of war, mourning, and resistance across nearly six feet of canvas mounted on board. The large format hints at the work’s first iteration as a collage in 1977, composed originally on a white background with a Gauloises cigarette package affixed to the work. It was removed in 1981 (shortly after the hunger strike death of Bobby Sands) and replaced with a painted wedge of cardboard; the white terrain then updated to an igneous orange. The gestural black forms elicit feelings of tension and grief, offering a symbolic reflection of the physical and psychological tolls of the violence, and lamenting on the human cost of political strife, all while resisting narration through figuration, instead allowing the work’s forceful coaction to evoke an instinctive response.
Exhibited in shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the work has been held in the family’s private collection since 1985. Now on offer for the first time, the work remains a timely meditation on the convergence of art and struggle, and the symbolic exchange of one historical context to another.
Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff, Untitled, 1968. Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
Executed in 1968, only a year before his death, Serge Poliakoff’s Untitled embodies the artist’s balance of form and color within the more contemplative dimensions of abstraction. A central figure in the postwar School of Paris, Poliakoff’s distinct visual style was rooted in the interlocution between shapes, with each form asserting a given space while acting in harmony with the image as a whole. In the present work, jigsaws of red and blue hover over a layered ground of earth tones rendered in oil and tempera, creating a rich plane that draws our attention to its tonal subtlety and rippling movement, all enclosed by a deep red boundary that articulates the flow of the work. One can almost hear Poliakoff’s beloved balalaika strumming along to The Peddlers as the painting shifts itself into place.
Acquired directly from the artist by Neuhaus in 1968, the work was exhibited at Lefebre Gallery, New York, in 1971, and illustrates the catalog cover for the exhibition. The work is particularly compelling as a resonant, spiritual expedition – Poliakoff’s own perceptions of presence, space, light, and tactility are shown here distilled into their most essential forms.
Discover more from Modern & Contemporary Art New York >
Recommended Reading
Bidding Open via the New Phillips Online App >