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• 1 media/page-header.jpg media/mountains and the sea.jpg 2020-10-14T22:04:54+00:00 Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountain and the Sea, 1952 36 Kailie Michalak plain 2020-12-07T06:25:48+00:00

  
  
  Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountain and the Sea, 1952

  Helen Frankenthaler has been dubbed as the pioneer of the second wave Color Field movement, accompanied by Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. However, her influence and agency to the movement is diluted when the aforementioned men take her painting methods as inspirations for their works. Frankenthaler's breakthrough work Mountains and the Sea of 1952 is the piece that ultimately catapults her career and a significant chain of works following within the Color Field movement. But there is one problem for Helen Frankenthaler here. She is a woman living in a post-war era. While this may be seen as a positive, given that women are given more freedom to work and agency to their lives, when it comes to formalist criticism of art (especially of art made by women), the patriarchal structure of society unconsciously attempts to compensate for the greater freedoms granted to women of the time by diluting the power and brilliance of their artwork. Helen Frankenthaler, among other women artists of the time such as Lee Krasner and the like, fall victim to this habitual bias towards analysis of art in the binary, looking for gendered cues in artwork, even where there are none. Helen Frankenthaler has been known to deny any discussion of women artists specifically, as she “consistently dismiss[ed] gender as an issue.”[1] This is particularly interesting as she is an artist that has been distinctly impacted by biased critiques of her work. However, her work was not about gender, sex, or anything in between, especially when it comes to her work Mountains and the Sea, this piece is an abstraction of a landscape. While Frankenthaler herself might deny the fact that her gender affected her career, there is no denying that she evidently was affected when looking in hindsight. Frankenthaler’s agency to her own artistic ability and impact on the future of art was reduced in the following areas in which this essay will explore: ‘feminine’ critiques of her work, her soak-staining technique, and the comparison of the depiction and reception of herself and fellow male contemporaries. 
  
  ‘Feminine’ Critiques of Frankenthaler’s Work: As women began to gain more agency in their everyday life as the US began to emerge into post-war life, men and the patriarchy, consciously or not, began to feel threatened. There was a threat from women as they women were no longer entirely at the beck and call of their fathers or husbands. Women began to have independence, and that did not sit well with the patriarchy, nor did it sit well in the art world. Especially as female artists, like Helen Frankenthaler, began to emerge and gain traction, a particular language in critiquing pieces by these artists began to emerge. A particularly anxious sort of language began to circulate in the art world. There was use of diction emulating and suggesting that men were “under siege,” or that there was a threat of a “feminine invasion” to express their inherent bias against the presence of women in the studio.[2] This bias manifested itself into the critique of Frankenthaler's work as being described as free, lyrical, and feminine — very different from the more insistent and regular rhythms of the best and most typical Pollocks of the late 40s and 50s.[3] However, Frankenthaler herself did not particularly appreciate being describes as lyrical as she expressed in an interview with the Smithsonian in 1968 that “There are two words that are applied to me often that I think are very wrong but there aren't any other words that I can think of at the moment that would --. But one is ‘lyrical’, and the other is ‘surreal’”.[4] Especially as it related to Mountains and the Sea, there is nothing depicted that is feminine in an outright sense. Critics and viewers might embed a gendered meaning in this piece, whether it’s through her use of color or her technique, but Frankenthaler was not interested in expressing the role of gender. So, when critics use gendered language when describing her artwork, they begin to dilute the agency to her work and its intended meaning. Perhaps looking for gendered meaning was, and still is, the general tendency of a viewer. Society has functioned in a gender binary for as long as the idea of a society has existed, so, the expectation that art is to be interpreted out of that binary might be slightly unrealistic for most. However, Mountains and the Sea is, at its core, an abstraction of a landscape Frankenthaler was recalling from a trip to Nova Scotia.[5] When one looks upon a realist or perhaps impressionist landscape, does one assume gender? As suggested previously, Frankenthaler did not have much interest in discussing the topic of gender, so with that in mind, would it be acceptable or even truly practical to introduce the concept of gender into her artwork?
  
  Soak-Staining Technique: Frankenthaler is well renowned particularly for her soak staining technique, a technique that emerged through her work Mountains and the Sea. After she created Mountains and the Sea, much of her work following was created using that sort of technique. She took inspiration from Pollock, but not necessarily in the literal sense of his technique, but in the sense of how he approached the expression of art, his approach to how the artist and medium interacted. Like Pollock, she began placing her canvases on the floor, and allowing her paints to flow, create puddles, and letting the paint interact with each other.[6] Although Pollock was known for outward expression of the body and the movement of the artist, Frankenthaler insisted that she was not an Action painter like Pollock, rather that she “[made] the fluidity of the paint — not the motion of the painter, as in Jackson Pollock's drop technique — primary to the animation of her work.”[7] It is here, especially in the comparison of her and Pollock's artistic approaches, that gender is once again introduced, and a dichotomy is formed. Their techniques were qualified by gendered characteristics as Pollocks painting method was described to be “masculine, as characterized by a linear, hard-edges” and Frankenthaler's work as “feminine, as characterized by a seeping, bleeding-edged stain.”[8] It seems as those who critiqued their work from this perspective are searching for gender, a way to distinguish one artist from another, a way to tangibly separate a man and woman artist. Is Pollock's work inherently masculine because he is a man? Is Frankenthaler's inherently feminine because she is a woman? Contemporary logic might lead one to reject that notion, but it seems as though critics of Frankenthaler's work were actively seeking the feminine in her work. As described by Frankenthaler's stepdaughter Lisa Motherwell, Frankenthaler “held a place in her arms as a memory, as something she felt, more than something she saw. She held the emotional memory of it.”[9] This feeling and expression can be seen through the abstraction of the landscape seen in Mountains and the Sea. There are bits that a viewer might be able to identify, but in totality, it is an abstract image, an image that captures the transience of a memory. Perhaps even the calming and gratifying feelings she felt while away in Nova Scotia.[10] Is there a gendered meaning here? Even a subtle or hidden gendered meaning? There likely is not an intention of depicting gendered concepts on behalf of Frankenthaler when creating Mountains and the Sea, as there is nothing inherently gendered about the image she depicts here. The experience she depicts here is a universal experience, one experienced by all people. This leads to the conclusion that the feminine qualifications to her work, and her style of painting, either consciously or subconsciously, were attributed to her in order to water down her artistic ability. Her ability is diluted in such a way to helps the patriarchy ‘recalibrate’ itself in a time where women are beginning to gain independence and agency to their own lives.
  
  Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis: Another instance in which Frankenthaler was stripped of her agency to her own art style can be seen through the reception of the work of Morris Louis. Clement Greenberg, an art dealer close to both Frankenthaler and Louis, introduced Morris Louis along with Kenneth Noland to Frankenthaler's work in 1953. Amazed, Morris exclaims that her work, her style, is “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”[11]Frankenthaler championed her approach to staining her canvases, but Louis and Noland both followed suit after visiting her studio. These three artists were the faces of the second wave of the Color Field movement.
  
  Though Frankenthaler received recognition for her work, specifically for Mountains and the Sea, some critics were not receptive. Critic Harold Rosenberg wrote of Frankenthaler and her work saying that she “merely allowed accidents to happen, passively staining the linen canvases with the seep and ooze of bodily fluids.”[12] Again, Frankenthaler is discredited when her art is reduced to a result of passive seeping of bodily fluids. However, when Morris Louis takes part in the Color Field movement and follows similar techniques to Frankenthaler his work is “typically described as massive, solid, hard, and sharp, Louis's paintings were seen to demonstrate control, strength, clarity, and firmness” While Frankenthaler's was accredited as “quite a departure from Frankenthaler's accidental soft, watery, decorative forms.”[13] Words like ‘accidental’ and ‘passive’ starkly contrast the boldness of words like ‘control’ and ‘firmness’. If they were following a similar technique and approach to their art, what is the primary difference that leads critics to describe their art in such vastly different ways? The primary proponent is likely their genders. Furthering the argument that people begin to seek gender where there is not, to separate those these deem as worthy and those unworthy. When society begins to shift and general outlooks of the division in gender begin to blur, action is taken on a micro scale, seeping into places like the art world. Artists like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler are prime displays of the paradigm of the perception of gender, and how society ‘ought’ to be in some ways.
  
  After exploring the ways in which Frankenthaler was on the receiving end of a societal bias against women artists, it is especially interesting to hear that she had to particular interest in discussing the topic. But perhaps denying any association with women artists was more of a feminist practice than we might initially think. Frankenthaler did not want to be a woman artist, but simply just an artist. Possibly Frankenthaler was trying to break through the implied ‘he’ when it comes to art (or nearly any industry for that matter). Lisa Motherwell recounts that “she lived her life as more of a feminist than many of us. Her push against the idea of being a woman artist was so important to her. She wanted to be seen as just an artist.”[14] She did not follow in the footsteps of her critics. She did not seek gender, femininity, or masculinity where there was not for her. As it was the pursuit for gender that qualified her work as second best to her male contemporaries in the first place. It seems odd that she did not have an interest in the topic of gender, or of her being a female in the art industry, but it is in the fact that she simply wanted to be an artist. She wanted to be an artist as male artists are described as artists, to be rid of a qualifier.
  
  
  
  [1] Whitney Chadwick, “Gender Race and Modernism after the Second World War,” Women, Art, and Society (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 328
  [2] Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler's Painting,” ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 375
  [3] Whitney Chadwick, “Gender Race and Modernism after the Second World War,” Women, Art, and Society (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 330
  [4] Helen Frankenthaler, interviewed by Barbara Rose, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, 1968.
  [5] Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler's Painting,” ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 375
  [6] "Helen Frankenthaler: Canal," Guggenheim, Accessed November 28, 2020, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1348.
  [7] Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler's Painting,” ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 375
  [8] Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler's Painting”
  [9] Sara Medford, "Growing Up With Helen Frankenthaler on Cape Cod," Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/growing-up-with-helen-frankenthaler-on-cape-cod-1527703140.
  [10] Karen Rosenberg, "Color, Chemistry and Creativity," New York Times, September 18, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/arts/design/helen-frankenthaler-at-gagosian-and-morris-louis-at-mnuchin.html.
  [11] Sara Medford, "Growing Up with Helen Frankenthaler on Cape Cod," Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/growing-up-with-helen-frankenthaler-on-cape-cod-1527703140.
  [12] Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler's Painting,” ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 375
  [13] Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler's Painting,” ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 378
  [14] Sara Medford, "Growing Up with Helen Frankenthaler on Cape Cod," Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/growing-up-with-helen-frankenthaler-on-cape-cod-1527703140.