CANON: Helen Frankenthaler
Hello there readers! This week I want to return to the initial premise of this new blog: under-celebrated female makers from art history. As fate may have it, I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a neighbor who, upon discovering that I studied fine arts in grad school, proceeded with enthusiasm to tell me about their favorite artists: Monet and Pollock. It's so great seeing people excited about art history and contemporary art (as they might perceive it), but general interest always strikes me as so much less nuanced than other art forms. Ask someone about their favorite music and, almost instantly, the conversation delves into appreciative descriptions of any number of bands in any number of genres. Even my partner, who prefers podcasts to EPs, can talk about Dawes, Daft Punk, and Death Cab. But, when it comes to fine art, the conversation most often ends with Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollock, or Warhol... perhaps, in similar ways, that broader knowledge of classical music seems contained to Mozart, Bach, and Handel.
Of course, I could dissect all the ways in which the commonly exhaustive list of Monet, Van Gogh, etc. highlights endemic white-male bias of art appreciation, but I will refrain for now. Instead, I'd like to delve into some alternatives to this list of greats and, as referenced in my first post, let's first take up Helen Frankenthaler as a foil to the mythic Jackson Pollock.

Let's face it: Pollock is everyone's favorite drip painter. His automatic approach to art-making revolutionized the artist's relationship to work. His emphasis is on immediacy over planning and contemplation. His works are devoid of historical or representational content, and he instead elevates form - line, color, texture - to a purified state of observation. For Pollock, formal elements of composition become extensions of the human mind at its finest, rawest, and most spontaneous. This conceptual reliance on and visual exploration of the subconscious situates Pollock solidly among the abstract expressionists of the 1940s who, as the standard-bearers of cubism and the precursors to surrealism, defer to the automatic movement of the hand and eye to create intensely emotional color field paintings (works composed of blocks of color), wild gestural figurations, and visceral action paintings to animate the turbulent state of a collective human mind.
The abstract expressionist movement was the first internationally recognized art movement that originated in the United States. Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline are other key names of this era, but women artists, including Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, also made significant contributions to this radical break in the conception of American art.
Helen Frankenthaler is a painter who captures the mystery and lightness of an otherwise mostly male-dominated movement; her painterly color fields, unlike Pollock's harsh brushwork, appear hazy and diluted, as if painted with heirloom watercolors instead of thick house paint. Born in 1928, Frankenthaler enjoyed a great degree of inherited wealth in her lifetime and, coupled with her eventual fame, she became rather well-known not only for her creativity in the studio but for her lavish parties as well. Frankenthaler's friendships, education, and oeuvre all speak to a larger-than-life persona and, appropriately, her canvasses are easily some of the largest of the abstract expressionists. Her most famous work, Mountains and Sea (1952), is nearly 10 feet across!

Unlike Pollock, Frankenthaler employs a softer and more organic approach. She makes fanciful allusion to landscape by use of blotted, washed lines and earthy, muted colors. Mountains and Sea, in a similar tradition to, say, Piet Mondrian's abstract cityscapes, appears as a highly simplified and deconstructed atlas page, with colors suggesting varying altitudes within a riotously self-contained island. It's so fresh and unpolished, even oily, that it could almost pass as a page torn right from Frankenthaler's notebooks, only writ large. Lavender and rose, and later reds and ochres, scarcely give hers paintings any hint of femininity, rather it is the nuance and lightness of hand that give her paintings a solidly and celebratory feminist bent. Wheres Pollock aggressively approaches his supports (e.g., canvas, wood panel, or any surface on which an artist paints), each mark a measure of manhood, Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea reveals the same degree of lyrical improvisation but without heaviness or coercion.
But what do you think? How do the differences in color between Pollock's and Frankenthaler's works inform your perception of them as artists and makers, as men or women? How do their different approaches to line-making affect your emotional response to the work? Find out more about Frankenthaler via her trust, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
Stay tuned next week for some more keenly researched pieces; I'd like to include references and sources in future reviews but, for now, consider this my version of "testing the waters." Onward and upward!