Sense of Place
October 2007
"I’M LOOKING OUT AT THE OCEAN—where the sky meets the horizon of the water—and it’s always changing. Today there are a lot of boats out, their sails like short white paint strokes. I wish you and Kathryn [my wife] could be here with me to see it." And we did, too.This December Frankenthaler will celebrate her 79th birthday (born in New York City, a daughter of State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthaler). This autumn also marks 55 years of her work as a major American artist, from an extraordinary creative career now beginning to match in length those of Michelangelo, Titian and Picasso.
Unlike virtually all other artists (Frank Stella, with his "Union Pacific," is a parallel exception), Frankenthaler began with a masterpiece—her "Mountains and Sea," painted on October 26, 1952, when she was 23 and only three years out of Bennington College. (Bennington itself would become the center of Color Field painting in the 1960s; an exhibition of Frankenthaler’s 1972 sculpture will be on view there this fall.) Painted in her New York studio in one session, "Mountains and Sea" encompasses ideas and images Frankenthaler had gained from a summer trip to Nova Scotia earlier that year, and especially, as she has remarked, "the unique contrast between the great wooded peaks and the horizontal ocean—the mountains and sea of its title." (The phrase may find its origin in Psalm 46:2, "and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.")
Art history tells us that the innovation of "Mountains and Sea" was Frankenthaler’s introduction of "stain painting"—using thinned paints on unprimed canvas such that the painted elements are consistent with the picture’s surface. It is this new formal character that gave the picture its legendary status. However, while it is true that Washington, D.C., artists Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland visited Frankenthaler’s studio to see the work on April 3, 1953, it would be a few years before its full influence was revealed in Louis’s "Veils" and the first of Noland’s "Targets."
Frankenthaler scholar and chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art John Elderfield has placed the large (7' 3" x 9' 9") physical size of "Mountains and Sea" in the context of similar-scale works by Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, all in some manner "color and field" artists. But setting aside Pollock’s big paintings, in fact only eight works from 1948 to 1952 by Rothko and only one painting (1952) by Newman are equal to or exceeded the size of "Mountains and Sea," so that its exceptional dimensions partly account for the impact it made at the time.
From "Mountains and Sea" to the present we might generally divide Frankenthaler’s oeuvre into two parts, along formal and expansive grounds. The first period, continuing up to around 1975, might be termed "stain paintings," the artist using this formal approach in pictures that engage unpainted white canvas as part of the composition as well as some pictures in which stained passages fill the entire field.
By contrast, the second period is heralded by layered and nuanced applications of thick paint, creating a more complex or perhaps richer expression. Interestingly, in the way that the Nova Scotia trip had produced "Mountains and Sea," so her 1976 travels in Arizona brought forth pictures with the earth tones and gradations of the Western landscape—introducing the painterly vocabulary that continues to the present. This division is not intended to minimize characteristics that extend throughout the artist’s career. Foremost among them is Frankenthaler’s tendency to create work by work, or to state it in another way, the fact that each work is individual or particular rather than part of a larger series.
In this regard, Frankenthaler is very different from other artists of her generation, including two "stain painters" of the Washington Color School, Louis and Noland, who worked in specific repeated formal series, a kind of serial imagery leading to a virtual "brand image" (something realized and used by Andy Warhol in his "Campbell’s Soup Can" paintings, which are literally brand images, and in his portraits). By her distinction of individuality, Frankenthaler is closer to her friends the sculptors David Smith and Anthony Caro (and, in a different way, also Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, who each explore, rather than deploy, a formal proposition).
We also find throughout her painting certain repeated "themes" as well as abstractions, most prominent being the landscape (and seascape), a reflection of her sense of place, either as the source of an abstract picture or in an abstract painting which evokes particular landscape associations. In a similar manner, for more than 50 years Frankenthaler has drawn insight from creating paintings that are abstract variants on Old Master pictures, from Goya to Brueghel, from Titian to Manet ("For E.M."); in the same way, one of her welded metal sculptures, "Matisse Table," 1972, was inspired by a still-life painting by the French master.
This reference to her sculpture directs our attention to Frankenthaler’s long engagement with other media, with the same particularizing approach found in her painting. This aspect of her work includes paintings on paper, collage and drawings, as well as a wide range of prints; indeed, among her most recent works are two prints finished this past June (Pace Editions).
Other works range from books to ceramics, standing screens to ballet sets and welded metal sculpture. Among the benefits of recognizing her more than five decades of work are the occasions to re-view aspects of her past work, including the unique body of 10 welded sculptures shown earlier this year at Knoedler & Company in "Frankenthaler: Sculpture." Interestingly, when these works—they were made in 1972 in Caro’s London studio and incorporate metal elements from David Smith’s estate—were first shown, some saw the sculpture as too close to Smith or Caro; our perception now is how different they are from those two masters.
To be sure, certain elements are so "Smith-familiar" as to function almost as collaged "symbols" within her compositions. This is especially true of "David’s Chariot," 1972, which includes wheels from Smith’s estate on flat rectangular forms folded like an envelope or folio. Its title, an homage to Smith, can be read in various ways—as a citation of Smith’s wheeled Voltri "Wagons" shown at the Spoleto Festival in Italy (which Frankenthaler once referred to as "chariots") or as a likening of Smith’s early death to the prophet Elijah being taken away in a sky-bound chariot.
Finally, another welcome aspect of this historic perspective is the distinction of masterpieces in her overall body of work. Thus, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which by tradition collects masterworks, in 2004 acquired Frankenthaler’s great Baroque-like 1973 painting "Nature Abhors a Vacuum." Indeed, the inclusion of the work at the National Gallery, with its extraordinary collection of 19th-century American paintings, points to another aspect of Frankenthaler’s art. Along with the influences of Old Master and modern pictures, there is something in her work that is akin to such 19th-century painters as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church and even Winslow Homer. By this I mean in particular the shared idea and practice of going to "places" and bringing them back—expressing the experience to viewers—by means of paintings. This combination of exploring and presenting pervades Frankenthaler’s art and is a key to her status as a modern, and American, master. In her work, a "wish you were here" finds the "wish" and "here" made present in paint and canvas and other media.
A consulting art historian, E.A. Carmean Jr. was the curator of Frankenthaler’s painting
retrospective, shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art, in 1989.