Helen Frankenthaler (1928 -) Week 1

Robinson's Wrap
1974
Acrylic on canvas
5' 10" x 7' 10"
Private collection

Mountains and Sea
1952
Oil on canvas
7' 2 5/8" x 9' 9 1/4"
National Gallery of Art, Washington


Seeing the Moon on a Hot Summer Day
1987
Acrylic on canvas
8' 7 3/8" x 5' 4 1/4"
Private collection

Born in New York in 1928, Helen Frankenthaler first studied with Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School. At Bennington College, Vermont, 1945-49, she received a disciplined grounding in Cubism from Paul Feeley, though her own instincts lay closer to the linear freedom of Arshile Gorky and the colour improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky's early work.

In 1950 the critic Clement Greenberg introduced her to contemporary painting. During that summer, she studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1951 Adolph Gottlieb selected her for an important New Talent exhibition, and she had her first one person show in New York later that year.

The work of Jackson Pollock proved the decisive catalyst to the development of her style. Immediately appreciating the potential, not fully developed by Pollock, of pouring paint directly onto raw unprimed canvas, she thinned her paint with turpentine to allow the diluted colour to penetrate quickly into the fabric, rather than build up on the surface. This revolutionary soak-stain approach not only permitted the spontaneous generation of complex forms but also made any separation of figure from background impossible since the two became virtually fused a technique that was an important influence on the work of other painters, particularly Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
- From 125 Masterpieces from the Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Critical Text: 'Mountains and Sea'

Text from Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings.

The Frankenthaler retrospective opens, appropriately enough, with the famous Mountains and Sea of 1952, a painting too beautiful, to use an old fashioned word, to regard merely as a historical moment in the march forward of the modernists, and too compelling, as beauty always is, to see only as a work that influenced some important artists to begin staining canvas. It is beyond question big with a future that would have been invisible when it was made, and so for us big with a past, momentous in the style wars of thirty something years ago. But it is worth the effort to try to see it as it must have been seen before the later history happened, as a cool composition of slender loops passing in and out of diaphanous washes of color pale greens and blues and pinks distantly Cubist but feminized, without the harsh angles, aggressive edges, and dangerous vertices. It is like a dance of seven veils.

As a matter of biography, Mountains and Sea was inspired by a trip to Nova Scotia, but it could as easily be seen as a still life rather than a landscape or not read referentially at all. The picture in the catalogue looks as if it could be a reproduction of an aquarelle. The great achievement, here as in the work that followed it for nearly a quarter century, consists of Frankenthaler's adaptation of the fluidity and transparency of washes over drawn lines, and the luminosity of thin glazes without the fat opacities of oil paint, to the scale of the large canvas, then the format of the Abstract Expressionists. But it would be a wonderful painting even if it had had none of its subsequent influence, and there are passages in it I cannot see too frequently. The string of drips in the upper right corner, for example, allow an archipelago of vibrant dots to form, the brush having discharged its delicate load and then, perhaps, descended to make the streak of pale blue in which the archipelago reappears, faintly, as a dot and then another paler dot. That is as beautiful as painting gets.