The New Yorker & Me: Gordon Parks' "Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Gordon Parks' "Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler"

Gordon Parks, Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler (1957)

Johanna Fateman, in her absorbing “Goings On About Town” review of the Jewish Museum’s “Modern Look” (The New Yorker, May 17, 2021), mentions Gordon Parks’ “incandescent staged portrait, commissioned in 1952 by Life magazine, envisioning the title character of Ellison’s novel Invisible Man." Unfortunately, that picture isn’t among the images available for viewing on the Museum’s website. But one that is available is Parks’ gorgeous Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler (1957). Interestingly, another version of this arresting photo illustrates the cover of Alexander Nemerov’s recent Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York. Nemerov describes the photo shoot:

When Parks came to her West End Avenue studio, Helen did not shrink from the occasion. In the images Parks took that day, she poses not only with her paintings but on one of them – Blue Territory. Her gaze variously pouty, confident, and serene, Helen gathers her legs up behind her, her blouse and skirt harmonizing with the pastel colors of her paintings…. Her simpering lips a beautiful shade of red, her dark hair a lustrous black, she looks up at the camera, Mountains and Sea over her right shoulder, her direct gaze suggesting a pride and power of ownership, a sense that she is the resident mermaid of this aqua-exotica, the maker of all the wall-to-wall shades of blue that translate so well to the magazine’s bright pages.

Nemerov says, “Of course, these photographs were pieces of marketing.” Maybe. But just because they appeared in Life magazine, doesn’t spoil them as art. Parks’ Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler is a most original and striking picture.