April 12, 2021 Issue

Reviewing Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, in this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik says that Nemerov “is underequipped to make people and pictures live on the page. No one could pick a picture out from all the others after reading his description of it.” I’m not sure this is entirely fair. In his book, Nemerov describes Frankenthaler’s early The Sightseers (1951) as follows:

A spread of thick sweeping black lines structures the picture, the artist keeping them loose and open. The lines move and vibrate, making a syncopated visual field, alive with scribbled crayon color, like a flashing neon sign caught in the pulsing moment when images and afterimages are the same.

And here’s his description of Frankenthaler’s great Mountains and Sea (1952):

The shapes in it remain stable – a bouquet of pastel colors anchors it at the center, alsmost as if the picture were a massive floral still life – but they also rise and float. Too turpentine-soaked to be opaque, each color refuses to be dense. Lightness comes into being, so the painting implies, precisely in its precariousness. Lightness is fugitive – it is always falling away, as Helen’s choice to suspend the whole floral array on the single blue line above the pink ball implies.

That “Too turpentine-soaked to be opaque, each color refuses to be dense” is very fine. Gopnik’s criticism of Nemerov’s ekphrasis is a shade harsh.

The best description of Frankenthaler’s work that I’ve read is by Peter Schjeldahl: 

Yellow Caterpillar, 1961, and Seascape with Dunes, 1962, feature rhythmical lollops of intense color as fresh as cold water and hanging together with the vernacular rightness of great jazz. 

That’s from Schjeldahl’s “ ‘Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective’ ” (in Schjeldahl’s The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990), a review that also contains this memorably cutting line: “But the upshot for pleasure-seeking eyes is that her paintings aren’t only not beautiful, they aren’t even pretty.”