Can there be anything left to say about the formalist painters of the sixties, artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, whose work, we were told at the time, concerned itself with the purity of painting as expressed by pigment that drew attention to the flat surface of the support? Surely not. The paintings themselves were self-evident, readily accessible, and for those who didn't find them so, or who wanted more, there was always the criticism to read, articles by Clement Greenberg and others.
Frankenthaler is now the subject of two new studies. One is a major monograph by John Elderfield, director of drawings and curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The other is a retrospective organized by E.A. Carmean, Jr. director of the Fort Worth Art Museum, who also wrote the accompanying catalog. Inasmuch as both are the work of longtime students of the work of Frankenthaler, they do not fundamentally revise the terms on which we have come to understand this artist. But by bringing her to the fore as they do, at a moment when the art of painting is so different from what it was when Frankenthaler and the others were making their names, they have the effect of separating her from her confreres and the effect of separating her from confreres and the rhetoric of that era. As a result we now see her in a somewhat different light than before.
The canonical view of Frankenthaler holds that she achieved her breakthrough to a mature style with the 1952 Mountains and Sea, inaugurating at the age of twenty-four a long career of Modernist masterpieces even as, owing to its impact on the younger artists Noland and Louis, it brought into being the Color Field school of painting. By opening his exhibition with Mountains and Sea, without any of the messiness of a formative period, Carmean clearly doesn't wish to question this interpretation. For him, Frankenthaler is a historical figure, someone whose achievements are not in doubt, but merely in need of periodic restating.
But the great advantage of a retrospective (and a book like Elderfield's, where the reproductions come uncannily close to the actual paintings) is that along with the views of the writer, there is the inarguable presence of the work itself; this serves to keep the questions open. Viewed down the length of her career, from the vantage point of 1989, Frankenthaler emerges a very different artist from the one we thought we knew. She appears better, but in unexpected ways. It may seem like heresy to say it, but her best paintings began emerging in the late sixties, and since the beginning of the present decade, her work has had an emotional resonance it never possessed before. She has also become a different kind of painter.
Breakthrough Painting
No one would question the importance of Mountains and Sea in Frankenthaler's oeuvre. It was the point at which she stopped being an apprentice second-generation Abstract Expressionist and stepped out on her own. Elderfield devotes an entire chapter to this picture. That may not seem necessary considering all that we know about it, and about Frankenthaler. But unlike Carmean, Elderfield's approach is on Frankenthaler the artist making her way, working to evolve the appropriate language and sustain a voice from painting to painting. His is a far more accurate portrait, for it takes nothing for granted, showing the artistic
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