THE cavernous fourth story of Manhattan's Whitney Museum, with its stark slate floors and 17-ft. ceilings, can seem as empty and remote as an abandoned temple. A-architecture, it is a demanding frame, diminishing the trivial but magnificently enhancing the heroic. Currently, frame and subject seem superbly conjoined in a display of 46 huge, brilliantly colored canvases by Helen Frankenthaler. There, on the impassive walls, color gardens of imaginary flowers bloom with subtle petals of mauve, maroon, crimson, orange, cinnamon. There are stately, bold, blaring rectangles of cherry and apricot, leaping palegold fires,...
Art: Heiress to a New Tradition
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