A Love of Spontaneous Gesture

By ROBERT HUGHES

Helen Frankenthaler, whose semiretrospective of 40 paintings opens this week at New York City's Museum of Modern Art and will travel after Aug. 20 to museums in Fort Worth, Los Angeles and Detroit, must now be America's best- known living woman artist. She is only 60, but she was precocious, and her career has been long. Among women artists associated with abstract expressionism, she stands second only to the late Lee Krasner. You could never claim that she has Krasner's emotional range as a painter: pessimism, anger, every abrasive emotion are caught in some inner filter before they can reach Frankenthaler's canvases and muddy their obstinately sustained lyricism. She keeps up the mood of Apollonian pleasure so well that one may think of Edmund Wilson's satire The Omelet of A. MacLeish, whose hero's well-made tropes "gleamed in the void, and evoked approbation and wonder/ That a poet need not be a madman, or even a bounder."

But unlike Krasner, Frankenthaler did prompt a change in the style of American painting that, though it seems less momentous now than it did 20 years ago, was quite decisive. This was the passage from De Kooning-style "gesture" (the most imitated side of '50s painting) to allover soaking and staining, derived from Pollock and Miro via Frankenthaler. No doubt, in the end, even the toughest woman artist shrinks from constantly hearing that she painted a "seminal work," but Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea, 1952, was certainly generative. It was the picture that provoked American color- field painting in the '50s and '60s.

The 24-year-old Frankenthaler painted it after a trip to Nova Scotia, whose coast is plainly visible in it: the pine-forested mountains and humpy boulders, the dramatic horizontal blue. It was made flat on the floor, like a Pollock, and records the influence of Cezanne's watercolors, as well as abstract expressionist painters whom Frankenthaler had studied -- in particular, Arshile Gorky, whose looping organic line is reflected in her sketchy charcoal underdrawing. For all its size, it is an agreeably spontaneous image (and was painted in one day), pale and subtle, with a surprising snap to its trails and vaporous blots of blue, pink and malachite green. The thin pigment is soaked into the weave of the canvas, making it, in effect, a very large watercolor.

When the critic Clement Greenberg sent Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland round to see Mountains and Sea in Frankenthaler's studio, they were astonished. "It was as if Morris had been waiting all his life for this information," Noland would say later. What they saw was a way to convey the weightless bloom of color without any apparent thickness of paint: light without texture. (Maybe they could have seen it earlier by looking at Turner's watercolors, but never mind: American taste ran to watercolors the size of Guernica.) Though practically no one now buys the '60s' doctrinaire readings of color-field painting -- the arguments, so often lapsing into petty-historicist casuistry, by which Greenberg's disciples set up this reductive art of pure, thin color as the climax of painting's dialogue with itself -- there is no question that Frankenthaler set the style going.

She would, in certain ways, remain an abstract expressionist at heart, a painter who loved spontaneous gesture and the kind of unforeseen imagery that popped out of it. From the big red hand (of God?) that appears in Eden, 1956, to the shamelessly romantic sky space that hangs behind the lavender blobs of pigment in Sacrifice Decision, 1981, one sees traces of the surrealist ideas that had formed Pollock -- an openness to the kind of unsought private image that was generally barred from color-field painting. Frankenthaler disliked programs and was not a self-conscious avant-gardist.

Nor did she shy away from declaring her responses to other and older paintings. Las Mayas, 1958, is a very loose translation of a Goya, turned upside down. Winter Hunt, 1958, in which a fox with pricked ears and pointed muzzle makes a now-you-see-me-now-you-don't appearance among swipes of black and reddish-brown on the bare canvas ground, seems to reflect Winslow Homer's The Fox Hunt. Among the later paintings are versions of a Titian portrait, of a Flight into Egypt by Jacopo Bassano, and of a Manet still life: For E.M., 1981, in which the colors and placing of fish, copper pot and black wall remain as gleams and traces after the objects themselves have gone.

Unlike Louis and Noland, Frankenthaler never worked in series; each picture was, to some degree, a new start. The pleasure was in the freshness. What is the central shape so comfily enclosed within the framing edges of Buddha's Court, 1964? A fat little figure, but vaguely so; the Rothko-like bars of color could indicate someone squatting in the lotus position. Yet it cannot have started from a figure: it is the sensation of calm presence that comes off the blues, in their association with tan and brown edges, that generates the "subject" of the painting. You still feel that Frankenthaler found something she was not looking for.

This openness comes in part from what the catalog of her last big New York museum show -- at the Whitney, 20 years ago -- rather stiffly called the "landscape paradigm." Over the years, it has been landscape (its closeup detail and far extension, its variety of light and color) to which Frankenthaler's images were kin -- if not in descriptive convention, then certainly in general feeling. You know before you read the label that it is the sea, and not an abstract blue surface, that spreads out in Ocean Drive West 1, 1974.

A complicated artist, then, and an original one, but not without her limitations either. Frankenthaler's forte has always been controlling space with color, vigilantly monitoring the exact recession of a blue or the jump of a yellow, the imbricated weight of a dark area against the open glare of unpainted canvas. Color is the chief subject of her pictorial intelligence, her main vehicle of feeling. But every patch of color must have a bounding edge, and Frankenthaler's edges tend to wobble; they are overcomplicated; in some paintings, like Flood, 1967, they just go limp. She is undistinguished as a drafter -- in fact, some of her mature style is an evasion of drawing -- and this helps account for the pulpy side of her lyricism.

Too often in recent years, Frankenthaler seems to have been content with the merely evocative. "Soapsuds and whitewash!" was the cry when Turner exhibited his more abstract seapieces, but it seems to apply more properly to Frankenthaler's atmosphere-laden abstract paintings of the '80s, with their elaborately swoony brushwork and cunning embellishments of not-quite- naturalistic light. They are very assured but seem a touch overpleased with their own sensitivity. Yet it would be a pity, all the same, if the present decade's recoil from the inflated historical claims made for color-field painting stopped one from enjoying this show.