Frankenthaler Revisited
Final Paper for Modernism Revisited taught by Dr. Thierry de Duve Fall 2024 at Hunter College.
Helen Frankenthaler was a revolutionary and extraordinary painter whose work professionally, and life personally is forever tied to The New York School. Frankenthaler's work was not ignored by critics. She had her first solo show at Tibor de Nagy in 1951 at only 23 and her first major retrospective at The Jewish Museum in 1960 at age 32.1 One cannot call Frankenthaler a particularly unappreciated artist. In 1965, in reference to her innovation of the soak-stain technique in the composition Mountains and Sea 1952, she is famously described by D.C. colorist Morris Louis as “The bridge between Pollock and what’s possible.”2 A sentiment that will haunt the artist’s narrative, much to her own annoyance, for her work is a destination in itself.3
A glaring gap in the coverage of Frankenthaler's work is revealed though, when one starts to look for what her former lover and long-after friend Clement Greenberg says about her work in his writings. Greenberg was a major critical figure in The New York School and his criticism jumpstarted the career of Jackson Pollock. Greenberg’s writings helped make sense of the trajectory of modernist painting: its tendency towards flatness, its fight against “middlebrow” and “kitsch,” and its unequivocal focus on the medium as means of self-critique. All concepts which seem to intersect with Frankenthaler’s stained canvases neatly, yet he does not acknowledge Frankenthaler in his writing until 1960,4 five years after the couple’s relationship ended and eight years after Greenberg first saw Mountains and Sea, the day it was made October 26th, 1952.
While Greenberg’s writings on Frankenthaler may be sparse, using close reading we can revisit them along with other writings of Greenberg to make sense of Frankenthaler’s work in the historical and aesthetic framework Greenberg gives us. The argument can be made that it is particularly fair to extend Greenberg’s writings to Frankenthaler’s work because of their relationship. Frankenthaler was a highly educated woman, coming from a wealthy family in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Frankenthaler never lacked the means or encouragement to pursue her cultural inclinations. It is of note that it was not until her senior year at Bennington that Frankenthaler decided to pursue painting as a career, for her heart was torn between the visual and the written arts. She nearly became an art critic and spent her non-resident semesters interning at art criticism magazines in Manhattan and Boston.5 It is also well documented that throughout their five-year relationship, the couple attended many museums and gallery shows together, one cannot imagine the couple walked these shows silently. An important part of Frankenthaler's mythology is her attending the 1951 Jackson Pollock show at Betty Parsons with Greenberg, where he famously tells her to “swim.”6 With this context we can speculate securely that Greenberg and Frankenthaler's relationship was one of intellectual stimulation, where the two equally shared and influenced each other's ideas on painting and culture. They were interlocutors as much as lovers. This allows this paper to avoid accusations of petty interpersonal gossip and assume how conscious and relevant Greenberg's writings are to Frankenthaler's work and vice versa.
Let us first start with where exactly Frankenthaler is mentioned in Greenberg’s writings. In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Criticisms and Essays edited by John O’Brien, Frankenthaler is mentioned in only 3 published articles and once in an interview.7 The first time Frankenthaler is mentioned is in an article written for the May 1960 edition of Art International titled “Louis and Noland”. The mention of her is a highly complementary sidenote. When referring to a previous article written by William Rubin he states, "It is no coincidence that among the painters Mr. Rubin discussed, neither of the two I consider serious candidates for major status (leaving Helen Frankenthaler and Paul Jenkins to one side as special cases) works in New York.”8 This sentence is frustrating for it acknowledges Frankenthaler as a “major,” or at least a candidate for major status in the eyes of Greenberg. Yet he does not attempt to explain what he sees formally in her work which makes it so major. We can begin to piece together a formal analysis when she is mentioned again a page later. He goes on to explain that the staining methods developed by Pollock and Frankenthaler and implemented by Louis make the unstretched canvas part of the paint itself. This results in color that is more “disembodied” and “optical.”9 Anne Wagner, in her essay “Pollocks Nature, Frankenthaler's Culture,” disagrees with this reading Greenberg gives of the optical and disembodied color and goes on to say that it “takes hostage”10 Greenberg's previous ideas in “Feeling is All.” We will revisit both essays later and judge whether Wagner is right.
The second time Frankenthaler is mentioned in Greenberg’s writing is in “Introduction to an Exhibition of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski” for the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery in January 1963. Her mention again happens briefly and in a context that illuminates another's work and not her own. Her name is cited in a long art historical lineage of painters who have thinned their paints from Cézanne to Vuillard to Matisse to Pollock to Frankenthaler. But the focus is on Louis and his taking up of this method of thinning and staining and building upon it to develop his technique of layering “transparent veils of paint in different hues one over the other so as to mute their separate intensities into so many neutral and ambiguous shades of a single low keyed color.”11 Again, his mention is complimentary and puts Frankenthaler's name in conversation with some of the “greats” but fails to tell us why. This casual connection he makes between Cézanne and Frankenthaler foreshadows a comparison we will make further on in the paper, using Greenberg's own words to draw this connection, but for now, we must be content with the simple lineage.
The third and final mention of Frankenthaler in Greenberg’s critical works is in an introduction for the exhibit “Post Painterly Abstraction” curated by Greenberg for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, held from April to June of 1964. The show included three of Frankenthaler’s works: Approach (1962), The Last Swan Lake (1962), and Quarter to Six (1963).12In reference to Frankenthaler, he states, “[Her] soakings and blottings of paint, which go back almost as far, open rather than close the picture, and would do so without the openness of her layout”13 This sentence is as equally exciting as it is frustrating; and as the only direct formal analysis we get of Frankenthaler’s work from Greenberg, the sentence deserves to be analyzed closely. While the beginning of the sentence before the comma is straightforward the short phrase in the middle of the sentence, “which go back almost as far” complicates things. One understands that the “which” applies to her soakings and blottings. “Go back” refers to the directions in which her marks go. Though whether he means the paint physically goes back into the unstretched canvas as a result of the stain or the optical effect of the color going back and creating a sense of depth, we do not know. “Almost” is the qualifier suggesting that the paint does not go back completely or as completely as something else. The “as far” seems to refer to something that goes farther and knowing what this is in reference to could help illuminate what exactly he meant earlier by “go back.” But the previous sentence does not assist us since it simply refers to Sam Francis’s “liquefying touch... that somehow coveys light and air” no mention of anything going back or far. The phrase could be referring to the phrase that follows the comma “open rather than close the picture” perhaps insinuating that her paint stains go back “almost as far” as they open the picture. But this explanation does not satisfy us, or at least this author, completely logically, and without an opportunity to see these pieces in person,14 I cannot rightfully begin to speculate what he means or what I see in the canvases.
From these few mentions, we can gather some, but not a lot, of information on what Greenberg thinks of Frankenthaler’s work. We know he thinks of her as a major artist and that her development of the soak stain technique was key in the development of other color field artists. And extending his analysis of the Color field artist’s use of color to her work we can argue that he sees her use of color as disembodied and optical though we will complicate this reading further on. We know he sees a lineage, at least in technique, from her to Cézanne to Vuillard to Matisse. Finally, we know he sees her canvases as open and sees the stains as going back into the canvas, creating an optical but not illusionistic sense of depth.
Though these sparse mentions tease the audience by gesturing toward Frankenthaler's greatness and her importance within the art historical canon, they leave the reader wanting more. Greenberg taught the world how to look at a Pollock and acknowledged the “bridge” between Pollock and Frankenthaler but left us wondering how exactly to look at Frankenthaler. Of course, one could apply his analysis of Noland and Louis to Frankenthaler but by looking at a Frankenthaler compared to the two you can see distinct differences. I suggest that we can use writings of Greenberg that do not directly reference Frankenthaler, but which feel relevant to her education and style, to start to piece together a more thorough Greenbergian analysis of Frankenthaler's work.
While there is a rich well of texts to choose from, considering Greenberg's four-volume collected works, I have selected three Greenberg texts that can best illuminate the formal qualities of Frankenthaler’s work. “The Role of Nature in Modernist Painting” will help us see how Frankenthaler's traversing of cubism will be essential to her growth as an artist as well as how important her references to nature are within her compositions. “Feeling is All” and “Cézanne Gateway to Contemporary Painting”, both written in 1952 in the months before Frankenthaler returned from her Nova Scotia trip with Greenberg and created Mountains and Sea, hold ideas that would be fresh in the mind of the erudite couple. I venture that we can go further and state that these ideas would have derived, at least in part, from conversations Greenberg and Frankenthaler shared on art at the precipice of Frankenthaler's breakthrough.
“The Role of Nature in Modernist Painting” was written in January 1949 for Partisan Review, nearly a year and a half before the couple's first meeting and while Frankenthaler is in her last year at Bennington, studying in her non-resident term with artist Wallace Harrison and working for Associated American Artists Gallery.15 She potentially could have read the article on release. The piece begins by stressing the importance of cubism in the development of art history and the need for great artists to “make contact” with it in order to create superior compositions.16 Frankenthaler has a long history in cubist training, citing her training under Paul Feely at Bennington.17 Many of her first compositions take on a pseudo-cubist style. In fact the first painting of hers we know Greenberg to have commented on, the 1950 composition Woman on a Horse, borrowed an amateur Picasso style. Though Greenberg was notably displeased with the composition, according to Barbara Rose’s monograph.18 But Greenberg did not say one had to paint only in the cubist style, but that one had to make contact with cubism, and Frankenthaler’s contact is well documented in her education as a young painter and helps ground her otherwise impressionistic and cottony compositions.
Later in the same article, Greenberg discusses a difference between the Impressionists and the Cubists. While the impressionists sought “purely visual sensations” the cubists were concerned with forms, surface, and volume and left behind color.19 It is easy to associate Frankenthaler with the impressionists, with her cloud-like blottings and preferred pastel palette, but one could not say her compositions are purely visual. There are hints of tactility in Frankenthaler compositions, and while volume is not a key concern of a Frankenthaler piece, form and surface most definitely are. In Mountains and Sea, one can see the charcoal lines she uses to attempt to contain her color stains and in her own description of her process, she states that she draws with color,20 emphasizing a draftsman-ike approach to her work and a refusal to sacrifice form completely. This continues throughout her oeuvre as Frankenthaler sneaks ambiguous and nearly surreal forms into her compositions,21 the effect of which is almost like making shapes out of clouds. Surface, as well, is at the forefront of Frankenthaler’s compositions, with the surface of the unprimed canvas and pigment being inseparable in the soak-stain technique. When looking at a Frankenthaler in person one can see the grain of the canvas embed itself into the paint. Frankenthaler’s refusal to fully sacrifice form and her emphasis on the nature of the canvas via its texture shows how nature has truly, to borrow Greenberg’s words, “stamped itself” into Frankenthaler’s work.
“Feeling is All” was written for the Partisan Review in January-February of 1952, two years into the relationship between Frankenthaler and Greenberg and about 10 months before Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea. Greenberg will later rename this entry to “Partisan Review ‘Art Chronicle’: 1952” in Art and Culture, suggesting a hesitancy or regret in the previous title. But at the time it was called “Felling is All” and this is the title he would have discussed with Frankenthaler. He begins this entry with ruminations on honesty and talent, stating both are “decisive” factors in art. On Matisse’s greatness, he writes “He did not want to be original he wanted to be true. The only reason for striving for independence was that other painters’ styles required that he feel altogether the way they had, which he did not”22 This is particularly relevant went discussing Frankenthaler’s work in the context of the development of the soak-stain technique in Mountains and Sea. The composition‘s greatness is often reliant on that singular blurb and not discussed further. All the stress is put on its originality and the skill of Frankenthaler but not the artist’s honesty or the painting’s truth. I believe like Matisse, Frankenthaler, when she thinned her paints in coffee cans and spilled them onto the unstretched, unprimed cotton duck on the floor, wasn't looking to be original but to be true. And obviously, she achieved some sort of truth after making Mountains and Sea, for she continued on in this style for the rest of her life. This is why the artist takes such issue with being identified solely as the bridge for she found her location.
In “Feeling Is All” Greenberg warns of the “trickiness” of modern art. He explains that while detachment from emotions is in some ways necessary for a painter, a detachment that is too “conscious” in art results in an insincerity Greenberg labels as “trickiness.” In turn, he cautiously embraces the “obviousness of emotion” of German Expressionism and states that “the danger of sentimentality” is not as great as it used to be in the face of this “slickness.”23 These are all the "previous ideas“ I suspect Anne Wagner claims are held “hostage“ In Greenberg’s ”Louis and Noland.” As discussed earlier, in“Louis and Noland” Greenberg describes color field painting’s use of color as optical and disembodied. And while he praises this effect in the 1960 article the language of disembodiment evokes the “slickness” that Greenberg warns us about in ”Feeling is All.“ If color is optical and disembodied, it is detached from feeling and not an accurate description of the effect of the soak stain, at least in Frankenthaler’s compositions. Perhaps it is just this author’s subjective experience but one truly feels a Frankenthaler. The warmness of the unprimed canvas, the grooves of the fabric, the romantic color palette, the grandness of the size, and the assertion of the painter‘s presence all give a Frankenthaler piece a dense aura of feeling. And according to Greenberg, at least in 1952, feeling is all.
“Cézanne Gateway to Contemporary Painting” is published in American Mercury in June of 1952 four months before Frankenthaler composes Mountains and Sea. This paper by far is not the first to make a connection between Cézanne and Frankenthaler. John Elderfield cites Cézanne's treatment of oil paints as though they were watercolors, allowing for a lighter but still grounded color, as a major influence on Frankenthaler’s work.24 Cynthia Rowley’s book on Frankenthaler details her theories behind Frankenthaler’s Cézannean influence. She posits that Frankenthaler and Greenberg took their famous trip to Nova Scotia, which inspires Mountain and Sea, in reaction to seeing Cézanne's watercolors of L'Estaque at a show in the spring of 1952 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These landscapes of Cézanne featured both mountains and sea. Rowley uses the writing of “Cézanne Gateway to Contemporary Painting" as proof that Cézanne was fresh on the couple's mind.25 Whether Rowley’s claim is credible or not we don't know, but we do know that the couple most likely attended the Cézanne show together and had Cézanne at the forefront of their respective creative outputs in the Summer of 1952.
The most important quality Greenberg finds in Cézanne's work, in this article, is his ambiguity. According to Greenberg, Cézanne’s ambiguity is derived from his use of deep cool blue lines which receded, to outline his warmer shapes which bulged forward to the eye, and this contradiction, he labels as an ambiguity, is heightened to a point he considers successful aesthetically. This ambiguity Greenberg states is, ”precisely one of the largest sources of pleasure in art.”26 Ambiguity is just as important in Frankenthaler’s art as it is in Cézanne's. Her work’s ability to balance the line between figurative and abstract, in control and expressive, stained yet also drawn, crafts the same pleasurable ambiguity that Greenberg observes in Cézanne.
Rowley also argues we can see the Cézannean influence in Mountains and Sea with the blue square intersected by the green-leaf shape on the bottom of the canvas. These marks, Rowley argues, replicate Cézanne’s planar brushstrokes in his watercolors of L’Estaque or Saint-Victoire. She goes as far as to argue that these marks are so essential in the composition that they either were the first or the last marks made by Frankenthaler.27 Following Greenberg’s line of thought, on the ambiguities of Cézanne's warm and cool tones one can also see the physical remnants of Cézanne in the composition’s large warm peachy pink mass in the middle which is continuously surrounded by and intersected with the cooler lavender and blue shades. This crafts that receding and bulging effect found in Cézanne, particularly in his still lives. Frankenthaler and Cézanne, who both treat oil paint as if it’s watercolor, have mastered this ambiguity creating some of the most pleasurable and beautiful art found in museums today.
While there are many Greenberg texts to choose from that could enlighten our view of Helen Frankenthaler’s work, in order to not overwhelm the page count of this paper we must stop here. This exercise in revisiting Frankenthaler through Greenberg’s modernism has allowed us to take a formalist approach to Frankenthaler’s work grounded in the writings of one of her closest peers during the creation of some of her most monumental works. This attempt hopefully has avoided the more problematic readings of Frankenthaler which place her femininity at the forefront,28 and asserted Frankenthaler’s status as a master of paint. Perhaps in the coming years, when Frankenthaler and Greenberg’s letters are unsealed by the Getty in September 2030, we will have a clearer insight as to how much and where exactly the pair influenced and thought of each other.
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1989), 409-11.
Morris Louis, Quoted by Gerald Nordland, The Washington Color Painters, New York, 1965, 12.
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (Gagosian, 2024). 84
Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 4, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 95,97.
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1989), 16.
Helen Frankenthaler, “An Interview with Hellen Frankenthaler,” interview by Henry Geldzahler, Art Forum, October, 1965.
Her mention in an interview of Clement Greenberg by Lily Leno, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Crticism Vol. 4, ed John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 310, is purely in reference to a story and has nothing to do with her work’s formal qualities so I will exclude analysis of this mention from this paper.
Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 4, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 95.
Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 4, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 97.
Anne Wagner, “Pollock’s Nature, Frankenthaller’s Culture,” in Jackson Pollock:New Approaches, ed.Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 187.
Clement Greenberg, “Introduction to an Exhibition of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 4, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 152.
Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964), 34.
Clement Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 4, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993),195.
Approach (1962) Is housed in the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. The other two are more mysterious. The Last Swan Lake (1962) I was only able to find a black and white reproduction in Barbra Rose’s monograph on Frankenthaler. Quarter to Six (1963) I found no photos or reproductions of online or in the monographs I referenced.
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1989), 409.
Clement Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modernist Painting”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 2, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 271.
Helen Frankenthaler, “An Interview with Hellen Frankenthaler,” interview by Henry Geldzahler, Art Forum, October, 1965.
Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1970), 24.
Clement Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modernist Painting”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 2, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 272.
Helen Frankenthaler, “The Achievement of Helen Frankenthaler,” interview by Gene Baro, Art International, September 20, 1967. 32-38
John Elderfield, ”The Pleasure of Unknowing” In Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler From 1950-1959, ed. John Elderfield (Gagosian, 2013), 20-21.
Clement Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modernist Painting”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 3, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 99.
Clement Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modernist Painting”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 3, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 102.
John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1989), 68-69.
Cynthia Rowley, Hellen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing Painting (I.B. Tauis & Co Ltd, 2007), 10-14.
Clement Greenberg, “The Role of Nature in Modernist Painting”in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticisms Vol. 3, e.d John O’Brien (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 117.
Cynthia Rowley, Hellen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing Painting (I.B. Tauis & Co Ltd, 2007), 18.
Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and The Body in Helen Frankenthale‘s Painting.“ In Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2005) 373-83. This piece discusses Frankenthaler’s work in connection to femnist concepts of the body and mestruation which most scholars inlcuding Elderfield and Wagner find problematic.