There’s a whole litany of quotations and anecdotes permanently lodged in the brain of anyone who has ever studied art history, truisms that gladden the hearts and ease the jobs of people who write gallery guides and museum press releases. Some of these tags are so tidy that you might feel justified in dismissing them as apocryphal if they weren’t so well documented. There is Cézanne’s recommendation that painters “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”; Picasso’s assertion that “nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing”; and Mies van der Rohe’s authoritative declaration that “less is more.” Everyone knows that Ruskin accused Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,” and that Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase was described as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” The most illuminating of these useful snippets are the stories about pivotal moments in an artist’s evolution or in the development of an entire movement. Take, for example, the twenty-year-old Stuart Davis’s resolve to become a “Modern Artist” (his capitals) after seeing the 1913 Armory Show, or the young David Smith’s move to sculptures in welded steel—the first ever made in the U.S.—after seeing photographs of Picasso’s and González’s pioneering metal constructions in a French art magazine. Closer to our own day is the familiar tale about a couple of aspiring young painters from Washington, D.C., Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, who early in 1953 visited the New York studio of an even younger Helen Frankenthaler and saw a remarkable picture that she had painted the previous fall, when she was twenty-three; they found that canvas, Mountains and Sea (1952), so stimulating that Louis later described Frankenthaler as “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

Anyone interested in recent American art has heard this story more than once, and Mountains and Sea, with its luminous hues, diaphanous shapes, and detached fragments of line, has become a kind of icon, regarded as the Urtext of stain painting because of the way Frankenthaler disembodied color by physically merging thinned-out pigment with the very fabric of the canvas. At once landscapelike and wholly about the way paint responds to the gestures of a particular individual, at once flat and spatially suggestive, Mountains and Sea issued a challenge to the wet-into-wet, dragged paint-handling and loaded surfaces that were the hallmarks of ambitious abstraction at the start of the 1950s. Mountains and Sea was startling when it was first painted and, as anyone can attest who visited the picture in the past few years at the National Gallery, Washington (where it has been on long-term loan from the artist), it continues to look astonishingly fresh, bold, and inventive.

There’s no doubt that this now legendary picture significantly influenced the direction Louis’s and Noland’s work took after their crucial New York visit. Mountains and Sea served as a catalyst for their own inventions, functioning as both a model and a point of departure for their pursuit of “what was possible”—which proved to be, for each of them, a highly personal brand of “cool” abstraction based on clean-edged zones of thinly applied, richly orchestrated colors. But in a real sense, Mountains and Sea was just as significant to the future development of Frankenthaler’s own art as it was to Noland’s and Louis’s. Or it might be more accurate to say that it turned out to be prophetic of the path she would follow.

I suspect that Frankenthaler was as surprised by the picture as anyone, since its loose gathering of floating, overscaled lines and pools of limpid, translucent color didn’t look like anything she had done before on canvas. In fact, it didn’t look much like anything almost anyone had done before on canvas. (More about that later.) But there’s nothing tentative or hesitant about the picture. Quite the contrary. For all its delicacy and the fragility of its tender, rococo palette, Mountains and Sea is painted with a sure and uncompromising, albeit flexible, hand. What’s especially admirable is that Frankenthaler had not only the acuity and good sense to recognize that she had done something out of the ordinary (or to believe whoever told her she had, which is almost the same thing), but also the guts to leave her eccentric picture alone. Most young painters, even young painters as precocious and visually sophisticated as the well-educated, well-traveled Frankenthaler, would have been frightened or frustrated by producing something that didn’t correspond to even the most advanced of existing norms; most young painters would have alleviated their discomfort by continuing to work until their picture resembled something they already knew and admired.

The story of Frankenthaler’s response to Mountains and Sea is told by the paintings she produced in the course of the 1950s, a body of original, adventurous work that still forms the bedrock of her formidable international reputation. Yet despite the importance of these early paintings to Frankenthaler’s mature oeuvre, it hasn’t been easy to see them. The last time it was possible to study Frankenthaler’s formative years in depth was in 1981, when Carl Belz, then director of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, mounted a comprehensive survey of her paintings of the 1950s, a splendid show that those of us who trekked to Waltham, Massachusetts, still talk about with pleasure. About half a dozen pictures from this early period figured in the Frankenthaler retrospective organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and seen at New York’s MOMA in 1989, but that’s been about it—until this January. Happily, a wonderful, tightly focused exhibition, “After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956–1959,” will remain at the uptown Guggenheim through April.[1]

Deliberately less comprehensive than the Brandeis show, “After Mountains and Sea” consists of about fourteen canvases representating the ways in which the energetic young artist explored the implications of her “breakthrough” painting. Some are familiar to experienced Frankenthaler-watchers from the occasional show or from Barbara Rose’s valuable 1972 monograph and John Elderfield’s insightful 1989 study of the artist’s work. The balance of the Guggenheim’s exhibition is made up of less well-known but telling pictures that help to round out our sense of what this prodigiously talented young woman achieved before she was out of her twenties.

The show begins, obviously, with Mountains and Sea. In any other Frankenthaler exhibition, the picture might have been a starting point simply because of when it was done or because of its evident aesthetic merits. At the Guggenheim, it’s clear that Mountains and Sea both declares the young painter’s individuality and sums up her formation. It not only announces the presence of a distinctive new voice, but it reminds you of what shaped Frankenthaler. The lyricism, generous scale, and authority of Mountains and Sea point to what the young painter would become. At the same time, the painting encapsulates her curiosity about a wide range of modernist traditions and demonstrates her understanding of the concerns of New York’s most adventurous painters of the period. Everyone who has discussed the picture has noted that its ambiguous, shifting space is at once reminiscent of the complex pulse of Cubist planes against the surface of the canvas and evocative of the landscape forms that Frankenthaler memorably described as being “in her arms” when she painted the picture. (She had just returned from a trip to Nova Scotia.) The painter’s familiarity with Miró, Kandinsky, and late-Cubist Picasso has been frequently discussed, as has her rigorous grounding in Cubist construction, a background acquired through her studies with Paul Feeley at Bennington College, as well as, briefly, with Wallace Harrison (the Australian-born painter, not the architect) in New York and, even more briefly, with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown.

It has all been thoroughly itemized: the young woman’s close friendship with Clement Greenberg; her getting to know, through him, the most significant members of the Abstract Expressionist generation; the effect of seeing their work in the company of their most perceptive and articulate critic; and so on. Frankenthaler is well aware of her good fortune in having been immersed in the exciting New York art world of the 1950s, but it wasn’t only good fortune that allowed her to profit from the experience. She may deserve credit for having had the talent and the wit to grasp the implications of what she was confronted with when she was plunged into the center of New York’s vanguard art world, but she was well prepared, thanks to her formal studies and the time she spent in museums. And you have to admire her sheer chutzpah.

Frankenthaler’s earliest works—pre-Mountains and Sea—reveal her pitting herself against the artists she admired most, trying on for size, among other things, Picasso’s simplifications and distortions, Gorky’s haunting, mysterious forms, and de Kooning’s wrenched planes, adapting them all to her own needs. Frankenthaler’s natural fluency in drawing—her unmistakable “wrist” —made de Kooning an obvious model for her, as he was for many ambitious artists of her generation; her earliest works demonstrate that she quickly “got” what he had to offer. She was puzzled, at first, by Pollock but soon realized, she has said, that while you could become a “disciple of de Kooning,” you could “depart from Pollock.” In Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler did just that, using his method of pouring paint onto an unprimed surface, the canvas spread on the studio floor so that it could be approached from all directions; but instead of emulating Pollock’s web of delicate dripped and poured lines, instead of coiling skeins of paint on themselves, as he did, to make a shimmering expanse at once confrontational and insubstantial, Frankenthaler made drawing and painting into a single activity, soaking thinned-out pigment into the canvas as both line and plane at the same time. It seemed as though her drawing gesture had somehow expanded effortlessly into sheets of radiant color.

Pollock pointed the way. Without his example, it seems probable that Frankenthaler might have taken a different direction in the 1950s. She might never even have made Mountains and Sea. But it’s also true that she made use of things already present in her own work when she painted her now celebrated picture—things already present, however, not in her canvases, but in her works on paper. Working on paper, in a wide variety of media, was extremely important to Frankenthaler at the start of her career—as it still is. Then as now, she used paper for its own qualities, not as a preparation for working in other media; before Mountains and Sea, some of her most accomplished—and largest—early pictures were realized in gouache, watercolor, charcoal, and crayon on photographer’s backdrop paper. Frankenthaler clearly enjoyed the uninhibiting effect of paper and exploited the way it encouraged fluid gestures and permitted a particular brilliance of color. Then as now, when traveling she frequently made watercolors, working freely from nature—which was how the Nova Scotia landscape got “into her arms” in the fall of 1952.

In Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler translated the immediacy, fluidity, and luminosity of watercolor into the scale and intensity of oil on canvas. In doing so, she gave herself (and as it turned out, a fair number of other people) a new syntax of painting, but the thinness and radiance of her color weren’t entirely unprecedented, nor was the directness of her result. Among the Abstract Expressionist generation, Gorky’s melting forms and halos of color, along with Gottlieb’s and Rothko’s barely inflected expanses of delicate hues, can be cited as anticipating Frankenthaler’s approach. An even more obvious (and potent) source is Matisse, who as early as 1912 made large paintings notable for their thin, brushy expanses of translucent, brilliant color. Even though it was evident that Matisse intended them as complete, resolved works of art, and even though they were in fact executed with the same ferocious deliberation as the rest of his work, his paintings of this type seemed to have been made in a single, brief, energetic campaign, as though they were oversized color esquisses —rapidly executed, sketchy studies traditionally meant to be worked up into denser, more solidly executed tableaux. Matisse made works of this sort at intervals for the rest of his life, even resorting to washing off the entire painted surface after a day’s work, in order to preserve the illusion of freshness and transparency in the finished picture over the long period of its gestation. Frankenthaler was certainly well aware of these precedents, which served as both inspiration and confirmation of what she was doing, but her own working method—and hence the appearance of the work—was very much her own.

Part of the originality of Mountains and Sea and the works that followed lay in the way Frankenthaler flirted with reference, allowing her spreading stains of color to look unequivocally like themselves and, at the same time, to evoke forms in nature, just as she allowed the paint-soaked surface of the canvas to assert the uninterrupted flatness of the surface and, at the same time, to suggest landscape space. In the works she made immediately following Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler continued to test the possibilities of staining, but most of her paintings of the early 1950s were darker and denser, and less watercolorlike. By 1956, however, she had fully come to terms with her discovery, and was able to spend the next years exploring the permutations of her new fluid pictorial language—which is why the Guggenheim show concentrates on 1956 through 1959. The exhibited works are urgent, passionate pictures, vivid evidence of the power of informed intuition, amalgams of Cubist fundamentals, biomorphic abstraction, fragmented recollections, and direct observation.

While Frankenthaler’s ability to invent unnameable hues and orchestrate resonant combinations of color in these paintings is both admirable and striking, perhaps the most striking thing about the show is the range of both the appearance and the emotional temperature of its fourteen or so canvases. Jacob’s Ladder (1957, Museum of Modern Art, New York), for example, is like the ghost of a Cubist construction. The lower two-thirds of the canvas is haunted by densely packed planes of warm, glowing color, their heat tempered by the unifying presence of white canvas shining through the thinned-out paint; as we watch, the casual grid dematerializes, turning into a series of transparent, overlapping stains, before erupting in a splatter of nacreous rose above. It’s Cubism disembodied, blown apart, translated into pure emotion and pure optical experience. Freed of the last vestige of illusionism, it’s still capable of making us think about pulsating volumes. (“I never start out only with color,” Frankenthaler has said. “I start out as a spacemaker on a flat thing with four corners.”)

In Interior (1957, private collection), by contrast, Frankenthaler makes her spreading pours and emphatic strokes momentarily coalesce into a glimpse of a room, complete with chair, table, and a painting on the wall—unless it is a window opening onto a landscape. The mood is southern, almost tropical. Interior is one of the solidest paintings of this period and one of the most unstable; however potent the evocation of place, the picture threatens to dissolve into pure, sensuous color relationships if you relax your attention to its allusions for a moment. Basque Beach (1958, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) is redolent of sun and sea, of outdoor dazzle and unbounded space, transubstantiated into exuberantly manipulated clashes of intense yellow and radiant blues. The sense of the outdoors and of pleasure is palpable, but not depicted. Was Frankenthaler daydreaming of private joys?

As with Mountains and Sea, Basque Beach’s imagery seems not so much intended as discovered, as if the artist’s feelings (or her memories) had determined the flow of paint without her willing it. At times, it seems as though she watched the seed of an image evolve without consciously directing it and then allowed the reference to become more explicit. Frankenthaler’s after-the-fact titles often seem to acknowledge her recognition of such associations. In Eden (1956, private collection), for example, long vertical sweeps measure off the surface of the canvas, asserting its expanse and proportions, and stabilizing a series of irregular rounded shapes; the title makes us read these verticals as vaguely treelike and briefly turn a yellow splash into a schematic sun—a kind of idyllic landscape?—before everything returns to being a series of ecstatic gestures made with a surprising variety of colors.

Such fleeting images flicker in and out of Frankenthaler’s abstractions, like syncopated visions snatched from memory. Yet other elements seem purely willful, as though the young painter were doing nothing more complex than assertively declaring her presence: take Eden’s bold, red handprint and its insistent, scrawled repetitions of the perfect score, “100”; or the playfully tallied and cancelled numbers—one through six— in the ravishing Seven Types of Ambiguity (1957, private collection). At the other end of the spectrum is the monochrome gray New York Bamboo (1957, private collection), a spare, reticent picture that pays homage to classical Chinese painting before dissolving into a series of widely dispersed characteristically “Frankenthaler” gestures.

The young painter’s forceful personality is manifest in each of these pictures, but it’s clear that she had no single approach, no recipe for making a painting. Each seems freshly conceived, or, rather, freshly discovered. (When Frankenthaler keeps worrying at a picture, it can sometimes sink under the weight of her revisions.) What is also clear is that her sense of what a picture can be differs strikingly from that of the abstract color painters, including Noland and Louis, for whom her early work proved so provocative. Unlike the deductive, dispassionate compositions of her colleagues, which reassert the proportions, dimensions, and unequivocal, literal flatness of the canvas itself, Frankenthaler’s pictures are informed equally by modernist assertions of autonomy and traditional notions of reference. (This is a statement of fact, not a value judgment.) Her references, of course, are not illusionistic depictions, but elliptical, private, quasi-symbols that usually have their genesis in her manipulation of her materials. Like Louis and Noland, Frankenthaler stresses the clarity and the uniqueness of the single gesture, but that gesture is never an end in itself; it creates space, evokes a place, a person, an emotion. Sometimes, too, Frankenthaler’s color patches and swoops of line are comments on other artists’ work. She occasionally uses art that she admires as the basis for improvisation; at the Guggenheim, Las Mayas (1958, private collection) bears witness to her interest in the Metropolitan Museum’s painting of women on a balcony, formerly attributed to Goya—yes, she has turned it upside down —while other pictures in the show enter into negotiations with, among other things, the sculptures of her friend David Smith.

Such connections are nicely discussed in the exhibition’s copiously illustrated catalogue, which also includes a long interview with the artist by the show’s curator, Julia Brown. Although all of the spontaneity of conversation seems to have been edited out, it is, nonetheless, full of interesting reminiscences and observations. Ms. Brown has contributed, too, a series of poetic, deeply felt, and thoughtful “notes on the early paintings of Helen Frankenthaler” titled “In Pursuit of Beauty.” The third text, by Susan Cross, curatorial assistant, is a scrupulously researched historical essay that provides essential background and context for Frankenthaler’s work of the 1950s. I wish Ms. Cross hadn’t perpetuated some of the hoary, but not wholly accurate, legends of the period—she overestimates, for example, the influence of the European “artists in exile” on their American colleagues in the 1940s —but that’s a quibble. And as a whole, the catalogue deals sensitively and intelligently with the issue of Frankenthaler’s femaleness and how it affected the reception of her work.

It is, as they say, a vexed question. Paintings with the intensity, ambition, and sheer beauty of the best of Frankenthaler’s works —to say nothing of their originality—would be noteworthy in any context. That they were painted by a woman in her twenties during a period dominated by a group of aggressively macho male artists makes these pictures all the more extraordinary. While Frankenthaler has been an important role model to many younger women, she has never made any of this an issue, refusing to allow herself to be co-opted by the feminists and resisting (rightly, in my view) the label of “woman artist.” Even in her formative years, she thought of herself, she says, “as a painter among painters” and clearly was accepted as just that, even if a few of her first critics rather simple-mindedly equated her transparent color harmonies with “femininity.” But it’s worth pointing out that in Frankenthaler we have, for the first time in the history of Western art, a painter who is female for whom no excuses or qualifying remarks are necessary. In her own time, she’s as good as the best and better than most. Period.

The Guggenheim exhibition makes it plain that Frankenthaler was that good from the start. Picture after picture in this well-chosen show is impressive for the inventiveness of its color, the unexpectedness of its composition, the delicacy and energy of its gestures, and the resonance of its elusive imagery. But what is perhaps most impressive is the manifest daring of these high-risk paintings. Frankenthaler’s method allows no second-guessing, no way back. The most fragile mark, the most subtle passage of color demands full commitment. There’s no place to hide, no way of undoing a shape or a gesture that goes wrong. Walking through the exhibition at the Guggenheim is like watching a young woman walk a very high wire. I don’t mean the terrifying spectacle I remember from the circuses of my childhood, where everything was done to heighten a sense of imminent catastrophe. Frankenthaler downplays the danger, making everything look graceful and effortless. It’s like one of Philippe Petit’s virtuoso performances, an apparently impossible traverse executed with incredible concentration, seriousness, and sureness, so that it looks like not only the most important thing in the world, but also the most joyful and exalted. Fearlessness, youth, and exuberance resound in these wonderful pictures.

Notes
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1. “After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956–1959” opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, on January 16, 1998, and remains on view through May 3. A catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Julia Brown and Susan Cross, has been published by the Guggenheim Museum and distributed by Harry N. Abrams (96 pages, $39.95). Go back to the text.