【名画欣赏】 Frankenthaler\'s New Way of Making Art

　

Frankenthaler's New Way of Making Art
The liquid pools of color in her 'Mountains and Sea' (1952) changed the course of abstract painting
By WILLIAM C. AGEE

　

On Dec. 12, Helen Frankenthaler will celebrate her 80th birthday. To honor her as one of America/>/>'s great artists of the past half century, New York/>/>'s Knoedler & Co. on Thursday opened "Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades," a mini-retrospective of major paintings spanning the artist's entire career.

Her breakthrough painting, the work that established her artistic identity and announced the arrival of a major artist, is "Mountains and Sea" (1952), currently touring in an exhibition of Abstract Expressionist painting. "Mountains and Sea" has long been recognized as an icon of American art -- a bridge between past and future that changed the course of abstract art, and her own work, by means of an essentially new technique. It is a painting of mesmerizing beauty, a marvel of modern landscape painting. Large in size, it is nonetheless intimate and inviting. It is fitting that it normally hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington/>/>.

Mountain and Sea

Ms. Frankenthaler painted "Mountains and Sea" when she was only 23, a precocious newcomer to the New York/>/> art world. She had studied at Bennington/> College/>/>, at the Art Students League, and with Hans Hofmann, one of the founding fathers of advanced art in America/>/>. She was well acquainted with the masters of modern art, especially Jackson Pollock.

In August 1952, Ms. Frankenthaler traveled to Nova Scotia/>/>, where she continued her practice of doing small landscapes. She painted in watercolor and oil on paper, working freely from nature. These studies helped to keep her limber and flexible, like a dancer or athlete tuning up or, as was the case here, a painter preparing for a major new effort.

On the afternoon of Oct. 29, back in New York/>/>, she tacked a large -- roughly 7-by-10-foot -- piece of untreated canvas to the floor of her studio to begin the largest painting she had ever undertaken. Her mind and her arms were filled with memories of the spectacular Cape/> Breton/>/> landscape. After roughing in a few charcoal marks as an initial guide, she poured highly thinned oil paint from coffee cans directly onto the canvas, as if she were drawing with color. She had no plan; she just worked, with control and discipline. At the end of the afternoon, when she had finished, she climbed on a ladder and studied the painting. She was not yet sure what she had done; she was "sort of amazed and surprised and interested." (This and the other quotes here come from the catalog to the Guggenheim Museum's 1998 exhibition, "After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-59.") It soon became clear that what she had done was invent a new way of making art.

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Her painting method, and "Mountains and Sea" itself, had not appeared out of the blue. Like Pollock, she had worked directly on the floor. But Pollock had used enamel paint, which stayed on the canvas surface when it dried. She wanted something more liquid, watery. Still, there was no concentrated effort to find a new technique. "I didn't try staining per se," she recalled. "I was trying to get at something. . . . I didn't know what it was until it was manifest."

She was trying to set down the urgent message she felt she was ready to express. All her life she had loved the water -- to swim and to watch changing seascapes. By working as she did, she allowed the paint to settle into the weave of the fabric itself, joining them as one. This application gave her a freedom, openness and flexibility that allowed color to move and expand in liquid pools, under the control of her hand and her arm, as if the painting were a giant watercolor. This avoided the dense paint and tactile weight that could often clog the surface, a problem Pollock had faced.

　

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From this point on, staining became the basis of her art and pointed to new directions for others. It also restored color to its old grandeur, a departure from the dark, angst-ridden hues of Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. "Mountains and Sea" invokes an unfolding drama of space, light and movement. Each color tracks its own course, free, independent and leisurely. It becomes a pastoral landscape of a type familiar in Venetian painting of the Renaissance, as well as in more modern works such as Henri Matisse's "Bonheur de Vivre" (1906) in the Barnes Foundation, a bucolic idyll that seems to recall a golden age, a garden of paradise.

Although the color and canvas are bound together on a totally flat surface, our eye moves, in her words, "miles back and forth" through the fictive space the artist creates out of her large, open washes of color. We almost feel we can lose ourselves in the fresh Canadian air, as if on a fine summer day. Indeed, we feel the topography of Nova Scotia/>/> clearly suggested, as the mountain-like peak at the apex descends down to the "sea" of the center-right. The hues themselves are not loud, but mellow, limpid. Pale blues, light greens suggest sky, water and forest, modified by areas of bare canvas that become colors and shapes in their own right.


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The painting received little if any notice when it was shown the following year. But in the spring of 1953, two little-known Washington/>/> artists, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, visited Ms. Frankenthaler's studio. Promising artists, they could not find their way out of Abstract Expressionism and into something of their own. "Mountains and Sea" was a revelation for them, "the bridge between Pollock and what was possible," as Louis later famously said. They adopted Ms. Frankenthaler's technique, found their own directions, and became central figures in the so-called Color Field school of painting of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a great chapter in American art. Nor was that the extent of Ms. Frankenthaler's influence. Her technique also started a drive toward an overall clarity and directness of color that informed much of the best art of the next 15 years, from the older Hofmann himself to younger artists such as Ray Parker.

　

Yellow Caterpillar

Good art is often quiet and serene, like lyric poetry. In an age that values the spectacular, color painting is not widely regarded today. From Matisse on, great color painters have been dismissed as "decorative." But good art wins, always.

Mr. Agee is Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History, Hunter/> College/>/>, City University of New York. "Mountains and Sea" is currently included in "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976" at the St. Louis Art Museum through Jan. 11, 2009, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., Feb. 13-May 31, after which it will return to the National Gallery.