On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art PIGMENTS OF THE IMAGINATION BY BRADLEY W. BLOCH Gustave Moreau, one of Matisse's painting instructors, told his students, "If you have no imagination, you will never be a good...
...The artist set her sights too low, as if she was not quite sure what to do with her discovery...
...The empty whiteness, plus the unusual juxtaposition of hues, give each pigment an equal share of our attention...
...Unfortunately, Frankenthaler is unable to harmonize the two styles...
...Her brush strokes, instead of providing a sense of definition, seem awkward and forced...
...As she honed her repertoire of techniques, Frankenthaler's compositions acquired a more minimalist tone...
...In the early '60s Frankenthaler embarked on a series of paintings that to my eye mark the real beginning of her career...
...Carmean Jr., Frankenthaler comments that she wanted "to find out why the Manet is such a good picture...
...The outcome is triumphant...
...Helen Frankenthaler, whose retrospective recently left New York's Museum of Modern Art for a stay in Fort Worth, is another colorist fueled by a powerful imagination...
...But the viewer can see that greater things are in the offing, and wishes the artist would get to them...
...Hers is a restless spirit, and its wanderings have already given us a rich and colorful legacy...
...Although the blocks of color have a monolithic presence, subtle variations are laced within them...
...Since the paint is soaked into it, the flat canvas itself becomes the work of art...
...The picture has generated a fair amount of scholarship, having been called "a sort of Demoiselles d'A vignon of the Color Field school...
...One is left standing in front of something like a child's puzzle...
...forFrankenthaler, color may be pure but it is rarely solid...
...Elsewhere, Frankenthaler seems torn between figuration and abstraction, doing justice to neither...
...Frankenthaler's interpretation, composed of intermingling paint stains, is thoroughly abstract yet remains true to the structure of the original...
...Her technique itself made an important contribution to the lexicon of Abstract Expressionism, most visibly influencing Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland...
...Perhaps it is fitting that an artist who labored in the Cubist tradition as a student should reach back to that inheritance in the creation of her most accomplished work...
...An ascending orange-red swirl on the painting's right evokes both the hue and form of the wings and raised arm of Bassano's guiding angel...
...The analogy with Picasso's groundbreaker is understandable, then, but it is not entirely accurate...
...In the exhibition catalogue, written by E.A...
...His versatility was prompted in part by the continuing modernist debate over whether a painting should be a representation of its subject or a decorative object in its own right...
...The green might normally be regarded as background, but the sharp discord between it and the orange throws the green into the fore, especially toward the bottom where the murky orange depths are revealed through a rectangular opening in the green plane...
...The painting's dominant amorphous orange mass is brought to life by a gentle gradation of intensity and hue...
...Only during the '70s and very early '80s does she seem to have harnessed her formidable skill to a mature vision...
...On Art PIGMENTS OF THE IMAGINATION BY BRADLEY W. BLOCH Gustave Moreau, one of Matisse's painting instructors, told his students, "If you have no imagination, you will never be a good colorist...
...Swan Lake I (1961), for example, displays a distinctive sense of color and balance, but the composition as a whole underwhelms: The "swans" are merely birdlike patches of unprimed canvas that have been left untouched by a field of blue...
...To say that she lacks Matisse's epic breadth is perhaps unfair, but the comparison does serve to point up a troubling deficiency in Frankenthaler's art: Viewing her output over the last four decades, it is evident that her achievement has been largely technical, affording an array of new approaches to the uses of color that are interesting but ultimately of limited resonance...
...Manet's canvas, executed in 1864, is typical of an era when French still lifes were heavily influenced by the browns and blacks of Spanish painting...
...It is, on the face of it, a curious test for a dedicated colorist...
...One can only wait expectantly for Helen Frankenthaler to discover a new path, as she surely will...
...Matisse believed color provided the means for doing both simultaneously, and the permutations his art passed through illustrate the various ways he went about trying to achieve that goal...
...At a time when Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline were working in black and white, Frankenthaler thus brought the French palette to the New York School...
...She sees the world through the fractured haze of an electron cloud...
...The challenge is harder than it appears to be, for offerings like The Human Edge stand totally outside the wide vocabulary of evocative associations on which an artist can draw...
...Frankenthaler's sense of construction—unexpected angles, stray drops of paint, slivers of blank canvas—keeps her material visually fresh...
...At no other point is her grasp of composition so knowing, her handling of paint so effective...
...The wide spectrum of colors—terra cotta, yellow, green—present in the subdued Manet afford Frankenthaler a fruitful point of departure for her interpretation...
...For E.M...
...Hint from Bassano is far more than a mere matching exercise, however...
...Concerning this period, Frankenthaler speaks of her "Cubism—of square after square, of planes moving in various depths yet flat on the surface...
...his collected works, ranging from Fauvist canvases to paper cutouts, form a virtual encyclopedia on the use of color...
...Given Frankenthaler's ability under those circumstances, it is not surprising that when she does anchor her paintings in more concrete subject matter the results are especially captivating...
...Demoiselles d'Avignon is a self-contained work, capable of standing on its own even as it signaled a new direction in art...
...For the most part, the work from this stage of her career is open, airy and altogether pleasant...
...she has essentially supplied us with an ébauche, a chromatic foundation of the Bassano...
...Mountains and Sea, despite its historical significance, labors under a certain tentativeness that became more evident in the paintings of the subsequent decade...
...While Pollock's viscous enamels sat on the surface, tracing a vivid record of the brush's path, Frankenthaler's thinned oils soaked right through, covering large, nebulous areas in a pastel wash of blues, greens, and earth tones...
...What is more, using bold hues, as Frankenthaler does, tends to further level the surface...
...The deep greens and blues that hold the center of this version are found in Mary's teal gown, and a precisely placed brown smudge has its echo in a boy's water jug...
...In Round Trip (1957) freeform stains provide a backdrop to more deliberate shapes resembling tulips and clock towers...
...Representative of this innovation is Tangerine (1946...
...Frankenthaler has captured the mood of the original...
...The retrospective includes three magnificent productions from the '70s and early '80s inspired by the work of Jacopo Bassano, Edouard Manet and Titian...
...1981), on exhibit for the first time, is another successful reading, in this case of Manet's Still Life with Carp...
...This sensation is heightened by the deep green field that surrounds the orange and extends out to the painting's edges...
...The background is dark, and a copper pot occupies much of the tableau, but it is illuminated by a white tablecloth and the glistening underbelly of the fish that cuts across the center...
...The contrast between the pale yellow-orange near the form's upper border, gradually yielding to the vivid reddish-orange at the center, gives one the spectral illusion of peering into the cosmos...
...Out of perfect flatness, vertigo...
...In the manner of Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler poured paint directly onto an unprimed canvas, but to gain an effect that was much different from the furious drips of "action painting...
...Nevertheless, she managed to construct images of seductive depth by containing large, irregular patches of color within nearly square spaces...
...At the same time, in making the piece her own she has found a way to integrate abstraction and figuration, a task she undertook in vain in the early stages of her career...
...Matisse, as it turned out, had imagination to burn...
...In the last several years, Frankenthaler has veered off in still another direction, placing splashes of thick paint against a background of pastel washes...
...The show opens with her most famous piece, Mountains and Sea (1952...
...Hint from Bassano (1973) takes its cue from the 16th-century artist's Flight into Egypt...
...also benefits from a stylistic change the artist made in the mid-'70s, as loose monochromatic whorls gradually gave way to purposeful and multiple layerings...
...On the heels of her "Cubist" period, these most recent efforts seem like a retreat to lowered expectations and are a disappointing ending to an otherwise memorable retrospective...
...Oneofthemore interesting aspects of stain painting is its absolute two-dimensionality...
...In The Human Edge (1967) large blocks of gray, orange and pink hang from the top, above an expanse of blank canvas, and bands of deep violet and blue wait down below...
...For E.M...
...It was then that she took up the problem of perspective...
...Hers is not the universe of Suprematism or De Stijl, where geometric color forms were often presented as indivisible elements...
Vol. 72 • September 1989 • No. 13
