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Helen Frankenthaler: Acquiring Strength
| Article
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16102 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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6 / 1989 |
1,996 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
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, born in New York in 1928, 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
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