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WD_283/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0283 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Art View; HELEN FRANKENTHALER'S ART IN THE 50'S" by Hilton Kramer, The New York Times.
Published: June 7, 1981.
The so-called ''second generation'' of the New York School - that was noted for winning a place for itself in the limelight far more quickly than had been common for American artists in the past, the sheer velocity of Miss Frankenthaler's career was unusual. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1951; her first museum retrospective, in 1960.
The 1950's was a period of high expectation and large ambition for young artists who knew what was going on in the New York School, and were sympathetically attuned to its esthetic momentum. (Such artists were not nearly as numerous in the early years of the decade as they got to be in the later, by the way. In 1950, the New York School was not yet the ''success'' it afterward became.) Few of these young artists were better informed or more keenly responsive, in this respect, than Miss Frankenthaler. Her friendship with the critic Clement Greenberg, whom she met in 1950, gave her immediate access to the leading painters and sculptors of the movement. It also shaped her thinking about what they were doing. It was through Mr. Greenberg that she met Jackson Pollock, and it was under Pollock's influence that her own style was formed - and formed remarkably quickly. If her position was privileged in the special opportunities it offered her, it must be said that it was Miss Frankenthaler's uncommon gifts that enabled her to take such prompt artistic advantage of them.
Her period of apprenticeship appears to have been very brief, in any case. In the present exhibition, the watercolor of ''Provincetown Harbor'' (1950) is very close to Marin, and another work on paper from the same year is very close to Kandinsky. The painting called ''Untitled (Tropical Landscape)'' and dated December 1951 is a fairly typical but still better than average example of second-generation Abstract Expressionism. The paint surface is heavy, though cleanly articulated, and every area of color is firmly locked into a contour that is drawn in black or brown pigment.
Yet by 1952 Miss Frankenthaler was working in a manner distinctly her own, however much it may still have owed to certain aspects of Pollock or Gorky or Kandinsky. She had thinned out her paint to the consistency of a wash, which was poured directly onto the canvas. This was sometimes combined with pigment applied with a brush, and in some pictures - most famously, in ''Mountains and Sea'' (1952) - it was also combined with drawing that provided the painting with a kind of armature on which to build its improvised structure of color. The look achieved by this method was closely akin to the fluency of watercolor. Soon the brush was eliminated from this process, and so was the under-drawing. The entire picture was created by means of pouring, or staining, these thin washes of color onto the canvas surface without the aid of any visible prior design. Even where the brush might still be applied, it no longer determined the course of the painting itself.
The pictorial images that resulted from this change in the artist's method bore a distinct resemblance, of course, to certain Abstract Expressionist paintings. The forms were gestural and improvised, however much thought about in advance, and there was a good deal of drip and splatter. Yet the visual weight of the painting had been radically reduced. It was as if Abstract Expressionism had been put on a diet. Certain features in the physiognomy of the painting remained recognizably Abstract Expressionist in origin, yet the whole effect was different - lighter, slimmer and more quickly legible. Color achieved a greater degree of immediacy and transparency as it came to dominate the entire experience of the painting itself.
This change turned out to have a decisive influence on the course of Color-field abstraction as it developed in the late 50's and 60's, but at the time it looked to many partisans of the New York School like rank heterodoxy. The standards upheld as models for secondgeneration Abstract Expressionism derived from Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, rather than from Pollock, and central to these standards was a sacred belief in the dense Expressionist surface. Despite the myths that were afterward spun around the phenomenon of the Abstract Expressionist ''drip,'' this was something more honored as an embellishment to painting than as a method of composition. Miss Frankenthaler's washy surfaces did not therefore look weighty enough to sustain a place beside the masters of the movement.
Art history moves in mysterious ways, however. The painters most directly influenced by Miss Frankenthaler's style were Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who acknowledged ''Mountains and Sea'' as their principal source of inspiration in turning toward the kind of Colorfield painting that is based on poured, thinned-out washes of color, and she is now widely acknowledged to have been the crucial link between the Abstract Expressionists and the Color-field movement. She has paid for this distinction by being consistently assigned a place in the latter movement, quite as if her paintings of the 50's did not actually belong to the period in which they were made. In his essay for the catalogue of the present exhibition, Mr. Belz argues - very persuasively, in my opinion - against this view, and he has obviously conceived of this exhibition as a means of restoring her work to its rightful place in the history of the 50's. I think he has succeeded.
Now that Abstract Expressionism and Color-field abstraction can both be placed in historical perspective, we can see that it is to the history of the former that Miss Frankenthaler's work of the period clearly belongs. Its every gesture, its animating energy, its whole attitude toward lyric improvisation - even its distant kinship with landscape painting - stand in vivid opposition to the more deliberate, more controlled, more rationalistically detemined methods of the Color-field school. Hers is an art that remains Expressionist in everything but its facture. However much the Color-field painters may have gotten from her, she has certainly never followed them in adopting the hard edge or the eccentrically shaped support as the basis of her painting. She has remained loyal to a very different order of vision.
''Mountains and Sea,'' which has long been on loan to the National Gallery in Washington, is not included in the present exhibition, and it isn't really missed. The reputation it has acquired as a sort of ''Desmoiselles d'Avignon'' of the Color-field school has itself distorted our understanding of Miss Frankenthaler's work in the 50's, and it is rather a relief to be able to study that work in its absence. Certain other pictures - especially ''10/29/52'' (1952), ''Open Wall'' (1952-53), ''Shatter'' (1953), ''Eden'' (1957) and ''Dawn After the Storm'' (1957) - give us a more substantial account of her achievement in this decade, while still other paintings here - most conspicuously ''The Facade'' (1954) - give us a clearer view of her limitations.
In this exhibition we can see how firmly tethered to the Abstract Expressionist mode Miss Frankenthaler remained even after she had effected a break with so many of its painterly practices. There was always something that drew her back to the haste and improvisation of that mode; the energy and growth of her painting - its unremitting search for a fresh emotion and the form that will give it voice - has clearly depended on it. That she was very young when she launched herself on this course should no longer prevent us from recognizing what it was she accomplished - which was nothing less than a major revision of the dominant style of the time. If in some way she was a fresher and more powerful painter in 1952-53 than in 1959 - as I believe this exhibition shows her to have been - that, too, tells us something about the fate of the Abstract Expressionist mode in the course of the decade that is traced in this exhibition.
For anyone with a keen curiosity about what the hopes for modernist painting looked like to a gifted young artist in the early 50's, ''Frankenthaler: The 1950's'' is, in any event, a show to be seen.
© 2007 The New York Times Company.
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