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. 

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.”

"Or is something else going on?"

Andrew Wyeth, Night Hauling (1944)

I’ve just finished reading Alexander Nemerov’s “The Glitter of Night Hauling: Andrew Wyeth in the 1940s” (included in Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, 2014, edited by David Cateforis). Its opening paragraph is thrillingly good:

How do we account for the strangeness of Andrew Wyeth’s art of the 1940s? How, that is, beyond discerning the surrealist undertones, finding the magic realist affinities, or seeing that Wyeth followed in a Brandywine tradition whose oddity was firmly established by the art of Howard Pyle: lone pirates on desolate shores; magicians and curly-shoed dwarves; Revolutionary War officers strolling down streets so detailed (down to every last timber, shop sign, and grass blade) they make your head swim? Is the young Andrew Wyeth only an inheritor of that tradition, updating it in a modernist-inflected manner for the 1940s, and might we leave it simply at that? Or is something else going on? Consider Night Hauling, a painting Wyeth made in 1944 showing a lone man on the ocean at night, furtively stealing from a lobster trap amid twinkling and gleaming pours of phosphorescence.

For me, that “Or is something else going on?” is an excellent kick-starter for almost any form of critical writing. It questions traditional approaches, and leads to more imaginative responses. 

Michael Fried, in his brilliant Realism, Writing, Disfiguration(1987) approaches Thomas Eakin’s The Gross Clinic in a similar way, arguing against the “blandly normalizing” realist reading of The Gross Clinic. Fried’s theory doesn’t convince me; neither does Nemerov’s, but I find their strange over-the-top analyses exhilarating. As Janet Malcolm says in her “The Purloined Clinic” (The New Yorker, October 5, 1987), a review of Fried’s book, 

Criticism as radical as this is rare, but only when criticism is radical does it stand a chance of being something more than a pale reflection of the work of art that is its subject. By disfiguring the work of art almost beyond recognition, Fried forces us to imagine it anew – not a bad achievement for a critic.

It all begins with that subversive question: “Or is something else going on?”

Alexander Nemerov's Questionable Religious Interpretation of George Ault's Russell's Corners Paintings

George Ault, Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946)

Alexander Nemerov, in his To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), propounds a cockeyed double-aspect theory that the light in George Ault’s wonderful Russell’s Corners paintings is religious. He says:

(1)  “In one sense it is Christian, the sign of a private devotion, strange as this may seem about an artist who hated religion.” He refers to Sassetta’s Journey of the Magi, a reproduction of which hung in Ault’s studio. He says that the star in Sassetta’s painting 

seems an apt model for the large and eponymous streetlight in Bright Light, making the lonely crossroads a place of religious reverence and holy guidance, even for a person like Ault who had changed his middle name from Christian to Copeland, who spent his life retreating from his mother’s piety (exemplified by Studies in Christian Character, a book she had given him as a boy), and who “denounced organized religion violently.”

(2) But in another sense, Nemerov says, “the light is also that of someone who believes God is dead.” The basis for this interpretation is that Ault’s wife “chose a quotation from Frederich Nietzsche to epitomize her husband: ‘Unless there be chaos within, no dancing star is born,’ and the Russell’s Corners lights are such Nietzschean glows.”

Neither of these interpretations makes sense to me. They’re inconsistent with each other, and they’re inconsistent with Ault’s loathing of religion. I prefer a more secular interpretation. 

In my view, the subject of Ault’s great Russell’s Corners paintings is light itself. As Sanford Schwartz says in his “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners” (included in his 1990 collection Artists and Writers), “He [Ault] gives us the light that’s reflected on telephone or power lines at night – light that resembles strands of a necklace.” 

Schwartz’s piece memorably concludes, “When you drive down a country road at night and see, from the lights of a distant oncoming car, telephone wires turning into thin white lines, you may say to yourself, ‘An Ault!’ ”