Heiress to a New Tradition

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, whistling blue sails of form.

In the Shadow. Many of the gallerygoers who have seen the show in the past month, including many of the critics, feel as if they had never really seen a Frankenthaler before. In Manhattan's close and somewhat clubby artistic community, nearly everybody knows Helen Frankenthaler as a charmer, a hostess and a presence. Back in the early 1950s, she was the brash, aggressive young girl friend of Clement Greenberg, the eloquent critic and self-appointed evangelist who has done the most to recognize and extol the genius of Jackson Pollock. For the past eleven years, she has been the wife of Robert Motherwell, and in a sense, Helen always seemed in the artistic shadow of her husband and other "first-generation" Abstract Expressionists. Thus it came as something of a discovery to learn that Helen can really paint. "For myself," wrote the New York Times's Hilton Kramer, "this exhibition establishes Miss Frankenthaler as one of our best painters." Barbara Rose, in an article for the April Art forum, will argue that Helen Frankenthaler is "one of the major figures in world art in the last two decades."

Major? She has proclaimed no new doctrines, founded no new school. But with this show, she has demonstrated that she has a clear and distinctive talent of high skill, great beauty and the kind of excitement that comes with the sense that the end is not yet in sight.

Miracle and Myth. In the eyes of Motherwell, who admittedly is a fond partisan, there are three reasons for her new renown. The first is her own talents. "Helen is a miracle," he says, "in that her art is very complete and at the same time abstract--her work is full of people, animals, flowers, and so on--but very highly transformed, so that only a very sophisticated person can see it." The second has to do with the fact that she is a woman, and "the myth is that when a woman is an artist, she tends to become dehumanized or desexualized, but this has not happened to Helen." The third is the context in which Helen finds herself in the spring of 1969.

After half a dozen years in which galleries and museums were touting gimmicks and gadgetry of all kinds, there is a renewed appreciation of what is called painterly painting--painting in which the sensuous quality and texture of the paint-on-canvas is rewarding. Pop, op, mechanical art and the newest of the crowd, earthworks, are still there--but somehow they no longer have the appeal that they used to.

The painterly tradition derives from Pollock, De Kooning and Kline, and Frankenthaler can be called an heiress of it. She might also claim to be something of a pioneer. In 1952, when she was only 23, she developed her "stain technique" as an extension of Jackson Pollock's method of skeining swirls of glossy Duco enamel onto a canvas spread upon the floor. Helen thinned her paint with turpentine and poured it onto the unprimed canvas, so that the paint sank in. The marks of the pouring or brush disappeared, canvas and color became one and the same. The result was so remarkable that when Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland came up from Washington to look, Louis adapted the technique for his own sullenly smoldering veils of color and fiery stripes. Noland borrowed it to delineate his electric targets and chevrons. Jules Olitski and Larry Poons would also admit their debt to Frankenthaler's innovation.

Abstract Heart. With earlier recognition, Helen might also have claimed another distinction. Anybody can see that abstract art is very pretty and decorative. What many were slow to understand is how any painting which does not have recognizable figures or objects in it can have any relation to reality, feeling or soul. Admittedly, this quality of feeling is difficult to derive from the impersonal, sometimes almost machine-tooled canvases of Louis or Noland. It is certainly there, but hidden, just as men make it a point of honor not to cry and to keep a stiff upper lip. On the other hand, Helen Frankenthaler's art deals outspokenly with emotion. It bubbles forth with irresistible elation, and could have been used long before now to show that abstract painting can have a heart.

Helen Frankenthaler's painting career began in the ninth and tenth grades of Manhattan's ultrachic, ultra-strict Brearley School. Her father, New York State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthaler, had died a few years before, leaving behind a beautiful widow, a sizable estate and three daughters. Helen was the youngest, and she soon found herself in "a very bad state, suffering a real childish sense of life and death." She found that only her painting class gave her "a sense of losing myself." Brearley girls sketched nudes from life and painted still-life compositions in oils. Helen was good at realistic painting. "It was in the wrist," she says, with a sense of delight undimmed by the years. "It was a world where I was safe, talented, secure."

She went on to progressive Bennington College in Vermont. The painting she contributed to a Bennington Alumni Art exhibition in a Manhattan art gallery in May 1950 was an amateurish pastiche of her Bennington teachers, Picasso and Art Students League. Clement Greenberg, who came to the opening, thought it was terrible, and told the artist so. Then, naturally, he had to invite her down to Greenwich Village for a drink.

Three Was Wow. During the next five years, the pair underwent what she recalls as "a painting bath." Says she: "There wasn't a show we missed, whether of Pollock or Fantin-Latour. We checked catalogues. One check meant we liked it. Two checks was pretty good. Three was wow! This seems the opposite of that lofty beautiful experience that art is supposed to be. Every painting is supposed to be a valid expression and interesting. But the truth is some work and some don't. That happens with all painters in every age."

"One way to learn how to make a painting work is to look and look--so that if you have an eye, you develop it. That's what we did," she recalls. "And every so often, we would go off with paintboxes and folding easels--not as camp, but as serious passion. To try and get some farm or field in Vermont or New Jersey onto the canvas looking exactly as it did, within the limits of our quasi-Impressionist style."

Empty but Outspoken. When they returned to Manhattan, Helen would try to distill her impressions of the real landscapes into abstract canvases structured not by the external reality, but in terms of an internal harmony. "The landscapes were the discipline, the abstracts were the freedom and the joy. Though I enjoyed the discipline, one was confined within a tradition that was dej`a vu. For me, just about everything has been said about landscapes, but I don't think everything has been said in terms of colors and shapes."

Greenberg encouraged Helen in her habit of tearing up canvases that were too easy or familiar. His critical mark is best symbolized today not in the myriad lilting forms and colors that she puts upon her canvas, but in the ones she leaves out. Her work incorporates empty spaces that are often more forceful and outspoken than the painted ones. In The Human Edge, for example, the real Frankenthaler is to be found--not in the weighty banner forms that hang down from the top, but in the horizontal rectangle of white that lies beneath and behind them.The whole picture was executed in rather a girlish pique in 1967. The artist was feeling resentful about the considerable popular and critical acclaim enjoyed by "certain hard-edge painters." Thus "the human edge" becomes a play on the expression "hard-edge." The whole painting says in bold and aggressive tones: "My name is Helen Frankenthaler--and goddammit, I know how to paint just as well as the boys."

The Split. It was after a 1952 painting expedition to Nova Scotia that Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea, a wonderfully warm and gentle abstract landscape in which for the first time she developed the stain technique. She moved her canvas onto the floor and began to use her shoulder rather than her wrist, employed paint cans rather than palettes, and a sponge as well as a brush. With a few minor variations, she still uses the technique today. It enables her to play unendingly with soft, airy, graceful forms.

Frankenthaler and Greenberg split up in 1955, and for a couple of years after that she turned out confused and not very satisfactory pictures. Then in 1957 she met Robert Motherwell, and they were married the following April.

They live in a handsomely renovated town house in the East 90s, with "his" and "her" paintings on either side of the fireplace. Never has Helen Frankenthaler painted more surely and decisively than she does at her two current studios, one over a hardware store on Third Avenue, the other in the woods near Provincetown, on Cape Cod. The Motherwells go to Provincetown in the summer, to be joined by Motherwell's two daughters by a previous marriage, Jeannie, 16, and Lise, 14. The landscapes done on Cape Cod sing with the oceanic blues, yellow sands, the faded greens of marsh grass, and the savage reds of beach plums.

They are all abstract, of course. Three Moons, for example, just happens to be called that. "The title has a whimsical quality," she admits, "that relates to it, but to me what counts is the way the forms work in relation to each other." That comment may be a bit of selfdelusion. The viewer can indeed see three moons in the picture, even though he has certainly never seen three moons in a nighttime sky, and so must conclude they exist only in the painter's imagination. By concentrating on the shapes alone, she can allow the fantasy to surface--giving it a name only after she sees it.

Other antic notions emerge as well. Militant playfulness seems to predominate in Sea Scape with Dunes. Its thorny blobs march across the canvas in a shape like a sea-horse at bay. A flamelike, almost scarifying vitality leaps forth from Interior Landscape, twisting savagely sidewise, up and around. Only the deliberately faded grays and greens, and the firm blue square in the middle, keep the painting from dissolving into a chaos of raw emotion. Still, any really good abstract painting, Helen argues, "plays on your emotional gut. It gets to you, and many people would just as soon leave that dimension alone. I think, in a way, a painting is a flat head-on confrontation, the same kind of thing that happens when you go to a concert and either you fall asleep or else you're moved to tears. But then you put on your coat and go home." A painting, unlike a symphony, exists permanently in time, and so perhaps "there is something about a head-on confrontation with a picture that might make people who don't want to have that experience uneasy."

Steel Blue. There is a monumentally unsettling force in Helen Frankenthaler's Blue Head-On. At the same time, a steely discipline is built into the picture. After years of developing her eye, she has found that many pictures normally "work" better with darker colors at the top. A sedate, woodsy green thus sets a lid on the upward rushing blue genie. Helen Frankenthaler is not interested in emotions for their own sake. Despite the modernity of her style, she is an heiress to a tradition that reaches back beyond Pollock; she uses themes as a kind of reality on which to base an esthetic experience. Her ambition--and she succeeds in it with a memorable frequency--is to marry inner joy and outer discipline in a work of art.

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