“The picture developed – bit by bit while I was working on it – into shapes symbolic of an exuberant figure and ladder…. therefore: 'Jacob's Ladder' [= the title of the painting she made in 1966].”

— Helen Frankenthaler

Quote on the birth of a title of her art-work 'Jacob's Ladder'; from: MoMA Highlights, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published in 1999, p. 219 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78722 <br class="br">1990s - 2000s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The picture developed – bit by bit while I was working on it – into shapes symbolic of an exuberant figure and ladder….…" by Helen Frankenthaler?

Helen Frankenthaler photo

Helen Frankenthaler46

American artist 1928–2011

Related quotes

“(Whilst demonstrating how to ladder a chimney) "As you get a bit higher up, the holes have a tendency to get a bit deeper; I think it's called fear"”

Fred Dibnah (1938–2004) English steeplejack and television personality, with a keen interest in mechanical engineering

Unsourced

“Talk to him of Jacob's ladder, and he would ask the number of the steps.”

Douglas William Jerrold (1803–1857) English dramatist and writer

A matter-of-fact Man, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

St. 5. <br class="br"> The Kingdom of God http://www.bartleby.com/236/245.html (1913)

“For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures…. these new shapes say…. what the symbols said. [Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s]”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 142
after 1970, posthumous

“I've always been told that I was a painter's painter... What does that mean?... That painters like my painting and the big wide world overlooks it, I suppose?... Well, I know... To me, it would have meant that - this is pre this new rage in buying and selling paintings - that, I think, that the formal values, like light, space, color, all those things that a painting is made up of, as well as the Jacob going up the ladder or Venus on the half shell or something [chuckles] would be what interested the painter. And perhaps the public would want the picture of the Christ child, so to speak. You know what I mean.”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

Tape number two, side A
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

“She was developing what Mom called a bit of a sarcastic streak.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

“She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.”

Mae West (1893–1980) American actress and sex symbol

#832 in The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (2006) by Robert Byrne

“Death slue not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies.”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

Another [Epitaph] of the Same (1586), line 20

“Success is like a ladder and no one has ever climbed a ladder with their hands in their pockets.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

Related topics