TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/061289/06128900.020

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 7KB | 125 lines

ART, Page 74

A Love of Spontaneous Gesture

The lyrical color-fields of Helen Frankenthaler are surveyed in

a new show

By Robert Hughes


    Helen Frankenthaler, whose semiretrospective of 40 paintings
opens this week at New York City's Museum of Modern Art and will
travel after Aug. 20 to museums in Fort Worth, Los Angeles and
Detroit, must now be America's best-known living woman artist. She
is only 60, but she was precocious, and her career has been long.
Among women artists associated with abstract expressionism, she
stands second only to the late Lee Krasner. You could never claim
that she has Krasner's emotional range as a painter: pessimism,
anger, every abrasive emotion are caught in some inner filter
before they can reach Frankenthaler's canvases and muddy their
obstinately sustained lyricism. She keeps up the mood of Apollonian
pleasure so well that one may think of Edmund Wilson's satire The
Omelet of A. MacLeish, whose hero's well-made tropes "gleamed in
the void, and evoked approbation and wonder/ That a poet need not
be a madman, or even a bounder."

    But unlike Krasner, Frankenthaler did prompt a change in the
style of American painting that, though it seems less momentous now
than it did 20 years ago, was quite decisive. This was the passage
from De Kooning-style "gesture" (the most imitated side of '50s
painting) to allover soaking and staining, derived from Pollock and
Miro via Frankenthaler. No doubt, in the end, even the toughest
woman artist shrinks from constantly hearing that she painted a
"seminal work," but Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea, 1952, was
certainly generative. It was the picture that provoked American
color-field painting in the '50s and '60s.

    The 24-year-old Frankenthaler painted it after a trip to Nova
Scotia, whose coast is plainly visible in it: the pine-forested
mountains and humpy boulders, the dramatic horizontal blue. It was
made flat on the floor, like a Pollock, and records the influence
of Cezanne's watercolors, as well as abstract expressionist
painters whom Frankenthaler had studied -- in particular, Arshile
Gorky, whose looping organic line is reflected in her sketchy
charcoal underdrawing. For all its size, it is an agreeably
spontaneous image (and was painted in one day), pale and subtle,
with a surprising snap to its trails and vaporous blots of blue,
pink and malachite green. The thin pigment is soaked into the weave
of the canvas, making it, in effect, a very large watercolor.

    When the critic Clement Greenberg sent Morris Louis and Kenneth
Noland round to see Mountains and Sea in Frankenthaler's studio,
they were astonished. "It was as if Morris had been waiting all his
life for this information," Noland would say later. What they saw
was a way to convey the weightless bloom of color without any
apparent thickness of paint: light without texture. (Maybe they
could have seen it earlier by looking at Turner's watercolors, but
never mind: American taste ran to watercolors the size of
Guernica.) Though practically no one now buys the '60s' doctrinaire
readings of color-field painting -- the arguments, so often lapsing
into petty-historicist casuistry, by which Greenberg's disciples
set up this reductive art of pure, thin color as the climax of
painting's dialogue with itself -- there is no question that
Frankenthaler set the style going.

    She would, in certain ways, remain an abstract expressionist
at heart, a painter who loved spontaneous gesture and the kind of
unforeseen imagery that popped out of it. From the big red hand
(of God?) that appears in Eden, 1956, to the shamelessly romantic
sky space that hangs behind the lavender blobs of pigment in
Sacrifice Decision, 1981, one sees traces of the surrealist ideas
that had formed Pollock -- an openness to the kind of unsought
private image that was generally barred from color-field painting.
Frankenthaler disliked programs and was not a self-conscious
avant-gardist.

    Nor did she shy away from declaring her responses to other and
older paintings. Las Mayas, 1958, is a very loose translation of
a Goya, turned upside down. Winter Hunt, 1958, in which a fox with
pricked ears and pointed muzzle makes a now-you-see-me-now-you-
don't appearance among swipes of black and reddish-brown on the
bare canvas ground, seems to reflect Winslow Homer's The Fox Hunt.
Among the later paintings are versions of a Titian portrait, of a
Flight into Egypt by Jacopo Bassano, and of a Manet still life: For
E.M., 1981, in which the colors and placing of fish, copper pot and
black wall remain as gleams and traces after the objects themselves
have gone.

    Unlike Louis and Noland, Frankenthaler never worked in series;
each picture was, to some degree, a new start. The pleasure was in
the freshness. What is the central shape so comfily enclosed within
the framing edges of Buddha's Court, 1964? A fat little figure, but
vaguely so; the Rothko-like bars of color could indicate someone
squatting in the lotus position. Yet it cannot have started from
a figure: it is the sensation of calm presence that comes off the
blues, in their association with tan and brown edges, that
generates the "subject" of the painting. You still feel that
Frankenthaler found something she was not looking for.

    This openness comes in part from what the catalog of her last
big New York museum show -- at the Whitney, 20 years ago -- rather
stiffly called the "landscape paradigm." Over the years, it has
been landscape (its closeup detail and far extension, its variety
of light and color) to which Frankenthaler's images were kin -- if
not in descriptive convention, then certainly in general feeling.
You know before you read the label that it is the sea, and not an
abstract blue surface, that spreads out in Ocean Drive West #1,
1974.

    A complicated artist, then, and an original one, but not
without her limitations either. Frankenthaler's forte has always
been controlling space with color, vigilantly monitoring the exact
recession of a blue or the jump of a yellow, the imbricated weight
of a dark area against the open glare of unpainted canvas. Color
is the chief subject of her pictorial intelligence, her main
vehicle of feeling. But every patch of color must have a bounding
edge, and Frankenthaler's edges tend to wobble; they are
overcomplicated; in some paintings, like Flood, 1967, they just go
limp. She is undistinguished as a drafter -- in fact, some of her
mature style is an evasion of drawing -- and this helps account for
the pulpy side of her lyricism.

    Too often in recent years, Frankenthaler seems to have been
content with the merely evocative. "Soapsuds and whitewash!" was
the cry when Turner exhibited his more abstract seapieces, but it
seems to apply more properly to Frankenthaler's atmosphere-laden
abstract paintings of the '80s, with their elaborately swoony
brushwork and cunning embellishments of not-quite-naturalistic
light. They are very assured but seem a touch overpleased with
their own sensitivity. Yet it would be a pity, all the same, if the
present decade's recoil from the inflated historical claims made
for color-field painting stopped one from enjoying this show.