{"id":372,"date":"2021-03-15T10:40:14","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T02:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=372"},"modified":"2021-03-15T10:40:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T02:40:14","slug":"how-a-moment-of-crisis-led-helen-frankenthaler-to-create-an-iconic-artwork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/how-a-moment-of-crisis-led-helen-frankenthaler-to-create-an-iconic-artwork\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Moment of Crisis Led Helen Frankenthaler to Create an Iconic Artwork"},"content":{"rendered":"

Helen Frankenthaler<\/a>\u00a0came in to the studio at two in the afternoon, moaning and groaning. She had just rented this working space on West 23rd Street, a few blocks down the street from her London Terrace apartment. The studio was a quiet skylighted loft in the back of the building. A canvas lay on the floor before her. Inspired by the art of Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings she had first encountered some two years before, she set to work.<\/p>\n

The canvas at her feet was unprimed. She had not bothered to apply the primer, a mix of Dutch Boy white lead and glue that like other artists she typically used as a ground to prevent the colors from bleeding directly into the canvas. \u201cI might have been very impatient to paint,\u201d she recalled years later, and in a combination of \u201cimpatience, laziness, and innovation decided why not put it on straight?\u201d She thinned out her paints with turpentine, curious to see how they would soak and stain into the big empty canvas\u2014seven by ten feet\u2014beneath her.<\/p>\n

Her first move was not to paint but to draw. She made a few charcoal lines clustering in the center of the big sheet. The lines suggested forms but only as an armature for what followed. Then she laid on the turpentine-thinned colors, blue and pink and salmon and red and sea-foam green, watching as they pooled and stained. The blue flared to the sides from a central fulcrum of pink and red, playing in and around the charcoal underdrawing, which it both respected and ignored. After three hours she stopped and called her studio-mate, the painter Friedel Dzubas, to take a look. \u201cThe point is, the point is,\u201d Dzubas said in his German accent, trying to find the words.<\/p>\n

Neither of them had seen anything like it before. There seemed to be no order. Angry detractors would say it looked like a rag for wiping brushes. But Helen felt each element was poised on a fragile edge of clarity, even of flaring neatness, like a wave risen to perfection at the moment before it spends its energy and falls apart. Spontaneity and structure seemed to flow through each other without ever touching, making something buoyantly free and vulnerably honest. Helen was \u201caware I\u2019d made something new and shouldn\u2019t fool with it one bit further.\u201d She called the painting\u00a0Mountains and Sea<\/em>\u00a0and signed it neatly in the lower right corner, dating it 10\/26\/52.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the time she was 23 years old, her future as an artist was uncertain. She had trained intensively as a painter at Bennington College in Vermont, and after moving back to her native Manhattan after graduation, she entered the city\u2019s small and serious modern art circle. She met the formidable art critic\u00a0Clement Greenberg<\/a>\u00a0in 1950 and began dating him in a relationship that would last for five years. Greenberg introduced her to Pollock\u2019s art and to Pollock himself, enforcing what she already knew but needed to hear: namely, that no art is good \u201cintellectually,\u201d that the greatest paintings are the ones that deliver a \u201ccharge.\u201d Helen\u2019s work did not look anything like Pollock\u2019s, but his drip paintings \u201copened up what one\u2019s own inventiveness could take off from.\u201d\u00a0Mountains and Sea<\/em>\u00a0was one such invention. Greenberg, coming to her studio, loved it. But Helen had her doubts\u2014not about the painting (she never doubted her art), but about her direction in life.<\/p>\n

Earlier that month she undertook a half-serious job search. \u201cI\u2019ve seen three people about a job on\u00a0Life<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Time<\/em>,\u201d she wrote to her best friend Sonya Rudikoff on October 6. She would take a position at\u00a0Life<\/em>\u00a0if offered one and relegate her painting to off hours, but she was not especially excited about it. The white-collar efficiency of the magazine was not to her liking. \u201cThe people that walk around the offices are almost frightening: brisk, alert, \u2018sophisticated,\u2019 Vassar and Yalish, thin, and groomed. Up and down the 36 floors of the Time Inc. building they talk fast smart chatter. I don\u2019t know if I could stand it.\u201d\u00a0Mountains and Sea<\/em>\u2014whatever it was\u2014was not that.<\/p>\n

Nor was it a political statement. Helen made the painting only nine days before the presidential election of 1952. Like Greenberg, she was a supporter of the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, in his campaign against the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Early in October she contemplated working on Stevenson\u2019s Professional and Business Women\u2019s Committee. A well-to-do Bennington and Manhattan liberal\u2014her father had been a New York State Supreme Court justice and a friend to many during the Depression\u2014Helen found Eisenhower\u2019s running mate, Richard Nixon, \u201cschmaltzy, low-class, and sickening.\u201d When Eisenhower won the election in a near landslide, gaining 442 electoral votes to Stevenson\u2019s 89, she was discouraged.\u00a0Mountains and Sea<\/em>, its paint still wet, still felt serious but also incidental among these momentous changes.<\/p>\n

Events in the Frankenthaler family also exerted their pull. Back in 1950 Helen\u2019s beautiful and imperious mother had begun suffering from a mysterious illness that turned out to be Parkinson\u2019s. By fall 1952 the situation was dire and stressful. Also that fall Helen\u2019s two sisters were having babies. Helen, the youngest, was not ready to start a married life, let alone one with children. But her bohemian life as an artist seemed maddeningly vague by comparison. When Rudikoff set sail for England with her husband in late September, Helen burst into tears. \u201cI felt that my own life had stopped as I stood on the deck and posed for the pictures and saw all the people going someplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the despondency made her turn to her art with renewed focus. \u201cEach crisis, if properly realized, can turn into production,\u201d she wrote on October 6. \u201cI feel full of hope and resolution these days.\u201d\u00a0Mountains and Sea<\/em>, painted 20 days later, was a venture in speculative freedom, an independent journey of her own, away from known shores. Deceptively casual, to this day it wants nothing of fixities and labels. The forms dance as if forever suspended in some pause of time. And back of that pause is some nameless feeling of the artist\u2019s own, her drive to cede darkness to day.<\/p>\n

From<\/em>\u00a0Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York by Alexander Nemerov. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House, LLC.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source\uff1ahttps:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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