Sunset Corner

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Sunset Corner is a 1969 acrylic painting by American artist Helen Frankenthaler. The University of Michigan Museum of Art bought it in 1973. In 2018, the work was loaned to the Williams College Museum of Art for an exhibition called Topographies of Color. A Times Union reviewer described it as a large, extraordinary piece, with a huge cascade of brick-brown tones and a vast, pale “sky” that keeps drawing the eye upward.

From 2018 to 2020, Sunset Corner was on display at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as part of a three-part series called Abstraction, Color, and Politics, organized by director Christina Olsen. Frankenthaler was a key figure in the Color Field movement, and Sunset Corner uses bright blocks and swaths of orange and gold, painted with her soak-stain method.

The painting has inspired other works, including Linda Gregerson’s 1996 poem Bleedthrough. Karl Kirchwey wrote about the piece as if seen through closed eyelids, producing a blood-tinged wash. A Michigan Daily writer also suggested it could be interpreted as representing menstrual blood.