HELEN FRANKENTHALER'S SEER by Joan K. Yanni

HELEN FRANKENTHALER'S SEER

by Joan K. Yanni

Helen Frankenthaler's Seer was presented to the Gallery by the Women's Council in 1981 in celebration of the Council's 40th anniversary. (The Council also gave Angelica Kauffman's Portrait of John Monck at the beginning of the anniversary year, and has presented the Gallery with such important works as Rachel Ruysch's Floral Still Life and Hyacinthe Rigaud's Portrait of Charles Gaspard Guillaume de Vintimille du Luc, Archbishop of Paris.)      

The seven-by-eight-foot Seer was created with acrylic paint and Frankenthaler's "soak-stain" technique. Though the raw canvas can be seen through much of the paint, the orange touches and white area were applied after the paint was dry, and lie thickly on top of the canvas. The central black area gives depth—one can almost walk through it. What do children, the most imaginative audience, see in it? Always water with foam—then everything from a hornet's nest to a piano (look yourself!). An adult visitor saw a golf course! The painting presents a mood or idea rather than a realistic image. Its magic is that it can be anything anyone sees in it.

Helen Frankenthaler (b.1928) was born in New York City to an affluent family and learned oil painting from artist Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School. She went on to Bennington College where she studied with cubist painter Paul Ferry and developed into a competent cubist painter herself. Later, inspired by the works of Kandinsky, Gorky and de Kooning, she began to move into freer forms of expression.

Frankenthaler met art critic Clement Greenberg at an art exhibition where one of her paintings was displayed. Though Greenberg told her he hated the painting, he became her friend and mentor and encouraged her to study with Hans Hofmann. In 1951 she was the youngest artist in a show of Abstract Expressionists. That same year, Greenberg took her to see an exhibition of Jackson Pollock's paintings, then to visit the Pollocks on Long Island. She was so impressed that she began to use Pollock's method and to work with her canvas on the floor.

In 1952 she caught the attention of the art world with her Mountains and Sea. Using a unique variation on Pollock's drip painting, she thinned out her paint and allowed it to soak into the canvas. Her new technique eliminated brushwork and paint texture, resembled watercolor, and created a new kind of color painting.  Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland began to exchange visits and ideas with Frankenthaler and to use her staining method in their own works.   During the next seven years Frankenthaler continued to experiment, regardless of the critics who viewed her technique with suspicion. Only when she won first prize at the 1959 Paris Biennale and was selected as one of four artists representing the United States at the Venice Biennale was her work re-evaluated. In 1969 her Whitney retrospective made it clear that she was the forerunner of an important new movement in American art.

In 1958 she married Robert Motherwell. He was a major figure in art, a distinguished painter, critic and one of the founders of the New York School; she was a star of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. During the thirteen years of their marriage, they were the center of art circles.

In the 1960s the images Frankenthaler created became simpler and more controlled. She changed from the use of oils, which had left "halos" around the edges of her forms, to acrylics and deeper color. She became interested in the illusion of space and luminosity. Later works are sometimes painted with more texture, with  thick paint pulled across the canvas with rollers or accented with drips or lines—such as in Seer.

Frankenthaler works without preliminary drawings; she plans during the painting process. Experience, intuition, inspiration, and a gifted eye guide her.  She spreads large, unprimed cotton canvas (the same as used for boat sails) on the floor, pours or spreads a shape, looks at it, and sees where the next shape is needed. She pours, drips, then uses a sponge or squeegee to spread more paint, bending down to smear or flick an accent with her finger, her foot, or the palm of her hand. Finally, she views the work from all sides or pins it to the wall to look it. If she finds balance, harmony of color and tension between shapes—something that "works," she will keep the paintings. If she does not, she may crop it or add a bit of color. If it still does not please her, she will throw it away. Though a tremendous amount of labor, thought and editing go into her works, they appear to be spontaneous.

Frankenthaler's work derives from nature rather than from geometric sources. She avoids the expected or the predictable, using a combination of inspiration and keen intelligence to create her works. Her paintings are in the collections of all major art museums.

Sources: Encyclopedia of American Art, E.P. Dutton, NY, 1981; Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists, Avon, New York, 1982; Time Magazine, March 28, 1969; curatorial files.