Are Frankenthalers Beautiful?

Helen Frankenthaler, Mauve District (1966)

Are Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings beautiful? I’m inclined to say yes. Peter Schjeldahl said no: “The upshot for pleasure-seeking eyes is that her paintings aren’t only not beautiful, they aren’t even pretty” (The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990, 1990). 

Schjeldahl’s judgment seems harsh. Is he right? Recently, two New Yorker critics looked at Frankenthaler’s work. They express a more appreciative view. Adam Gopnik, in his “Fluid Dynamics” (April 12, 2021), writes, 

By using the paint to stain, rather than to stroke, she elevated the components of the living mess of life: the runny, the spilled, the spoiled, the vivid—the lipstick-traces-left-on-a-Kleenex part of life. 

Gopnik focuses on Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique. I think he’s right to do so. That was her great discovery – thinning her paints with turpentine and letting them soak into a large, empty canvas. He says, 

What’s impressive about the early soak-stain Frankenthalers, of course, is how unpainted they are, how little brushwork there is in them. Their ballistics are their ballet, the play of pouring, and a Rorschach-like invitation to the discovery of form. Paramecia and lilies alike bloom under her open-ended colors and shapes. 

Zachary Fine, in his “Let It Bleed” (January 12, 2026) takes a similar approach. He writes, 

Instead of treating the “blank” canvas as some heroic arena where a painter goes to battle with predecessors or inner demons, Frankenthaler saw it for what it was: thousands of off-white porous fibres, usually cotton duck or linen, woven together into a deceptively smooth surface. For centuries, painters had primed canvases, building up layers of thick pigment and glaze to create the illusion of luminosity and depth. But Frankenthaler diluted her paints with turpentine, so that they’d stain the raw canvas like blood on a bedsheet. 

Looking at Frankenthaler’s work formally, i.e., in terms of her soak-stain technique, rouses my tactile sense. I want to reach out and touch its paint-soaked skin. Right there, I think, is the source of its beauty.

January 12, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Taran Dugal’s “Bar Tab: Ornithology” launches the new year in fine style. It’s a miniature masterpiece worth quoting in full:

The raison d’être of Ornithology, a bohemian jazz club in Bushwick situated under the rumbling J/Z line, is scrawled in white text on its exterior façade, next to a mural of a pinstriped Charlie Parker blowing away on his sax: “Bird lives.” This insistence on the genre as a thriving subculture, not yet relegated to graffitied-over plaques of scenes-once-prosperous, grounds the ethos of the joint, which hosts a constant rotation of some of the most exciting combos in New York. On a recent frigid Tuesday, a pair of seasoned patrons had tickets for the Ornithology Big Band, a ten-piece group, who had set up under some dusty Moroccan-style rugs hanging from the rafters. Across the room, Pharoah Sanders, in a large black-and-white portrait, looked on with an expression of discontent. The patrons took their seats by the bar as the group launched into a cover of “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music.” Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag. The Calcutta Cutie, however, made up for it, with a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough. It lasted through the end of the third song, penned by one of the saxophonists, who glanced anxiously around the room as his bandmates took solos. “Don’t fuck this up,” his furrowed brow all but yelled. As the set wound down with the mournful Duke Ellington number “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” the guests got to work on a Juju, a delightful, ginger-forward mix of rosemary-infused rum and lime. Spit valves full, chops spent, the band finished their set, and the patrons, ears ringing, set out into the night.

Jazz and cocktails. It doesn’t get much better than that. Ornithology sounds like my kind of bar. Thank you to Dugal for his vivid report.

2. Who is going to be The New Yorker’s new art critic? Adam Gopnik? Hilton Als? Julian Lucas? They’ve all produced “Art World” pieces recently. But for my money, the most promising candidate is Zachary Fine. His “Let It Bleed,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s a review of MoMA’s “Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep,” a show of five Frankenthaler masterpieces. Fine says of it,

It features five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler. They were all raised on Park Avenue, educated at Bennington College, and classified as second-generation Abstract Expressionists, but I have trouble seeing them as one and the same. The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel. The organizing force behind them, if you can spot it, has a wily mind and a preternatural gift for dispatching cliché from the canvas. After 1952, I don’t know if Frankenthaler could have painted a cliché if she tried.

That’s an intriguing way of seeing these paintings – “five paintings by five different artists named Helen Frankenthaler.” Fine’s observation that “The five pieces offer, in turn, biomorphic hints of de Kooning, the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, the bold geometries of Ellsworth Kelly, the paint smears of Gerhard Richter, and something that looks like toothpaste squeezed onto an orange peel” made me smile. The piece brims with original, perceptive comments. This one, for example, on Frankenthaler’s “Commune” (1969):

Picture a gray-green mass floating in the middle of a canvas that’s more than eighty square feet. The soupy explosions of the fifties, like “Jacob’s Ladder,” have been slurped back into a single, intelligible shape. From one perspective, the shape is an island seen from above. From others, it’s a half-finished paint job, a blast hole, or an ocular stain. The choice is yours: you can survey it cartographically, insist on its flatness or depth, or be reduced to your own eyeball.

Fine’s writing is fresh, vivid, and illuminating. I think the magazine has found its next art critic. 

3. I avidly read Justin Chang’s “Baby Blues,” a review of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s new movie “Young Mothers.” I love Dardenne films. I love their matter-of-fact documentary style. Their “The Kid with a Bike” is one of my all-time favorite movies. Their new one is about several teen-age moms staying in and around a Belgian maternity ward. Chang finds it a shade too schematic. He writes, 

Do these four stories, with their subtle yet strategic variations of attitude and circumstance, smack of a troubling tidiness—a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each pass of the narrative baton? “Young Mothers” won the Dardennes a screenplay prize at Cannes last year, which may only corroborate the charge that their naturalism here feels a touch too scripted. With less time to spend on each story, they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t play to their (or most anyone’s) cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communion with their characters’ unspoken thoughts, but, with the exception of Ariane—Halloy Fokan’s gaze is a killer—we don’t linger with any of them long enough to cultivate that degree of psychological intimacy.

Nevertheless, Chang likes the film. He says, “Yet ‘Young Mothers’ holds us all the same: not with the urgency, perhaps, of its predecessors but with an emotional pull as lovely and irresistible as the sudden dawning of a smile on a baby’s face.” It appears that “Young Mothers” is another excellent addition to the Dardenne oeuvre. 

April 3, 2023 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his “Art: Tina Barney,” says of Barney, “Only when she realized she could get closer to the truth by staging it—by subtly combining fact and fiction—did her pictures really come together.” I’m not sure how staging pictures gets closer to the truth. For me, truth is based on fact, not fiction. Peter Schjeldahl said of Thomas Struth’s staged Pergamon photos, “There is a subtle but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for the camera”: "Reality Clicks" (May 27, 2002). I agree. 

2. Johanna Fateman’s description of Helen Frankenthaler - “a mercurial colorist moving between pours and the palette knife, translucent washes and clotted impasto” -  strikes me as perfect: see “At the Galleries: Helen Frankenthaler.” 

3. Richard Brody notes the release of a new Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film – Tori and Lokita. The Dardennes are among my favourite directors. Their The Kid with a Bike (2011) is a masterpiece. Brody says of their new film, it “has the ardour and the specificity of investigative journalism.” That appeals to me mightily. I think I’ll check it out.  

4. It’s great to see Burkhard Bilger back in the magazine. His last New Yorker piece, the excellent “Building the Impossible," appeared November 30, 2020. His new piece, “Crossover Artist,” begins and ends with an elephant orchestra (“But no one could hear what the elephants were humming to themselves, in the deep subsonic of their own frequency, as the drums clattered and gongs crashed”). It's a profile of neuroscientist and musician David Sulzer, brimming with interesting musicological facts and observations. Example: 

A modicum of noise is essential to any instrument’s sound, it turns out. Reeds rasp, bows grind, voices growl, and strings shimmer with overtones. In West Africa, musicians attach gourds to their xylophones and harps to rattle along as they play. Music, like most beautiful things, is most seductive when impure.

I enjoyed “Crossover Artist” immensely.    

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. 

In Praise of the Decorative Impulse: Gopnik v. Updike

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 79 (1975)

I found Adam Gopnik’s praise of the decorative impulse, in his recent “Fluid Dynamics” (The New Yorker, April 12, 2021), refreshing. Too often abstraction is condescended to as merely decorative. Recall John Updike’s famous putdown of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park No. 79 (1975): “Meeting a painting like this, so beautiful in its balanced tones and enigmatic nervousness, not in our reductive pages but on a suitably large wall, we accept it as ‘art,’ an expensive variety of wallpaper” (Just Looking, 1989). 

I read that many years ago and never forgot it. Is that what abstraction is – “an expensive variety of wallpaper”? Gopnik provides a tonic counter-perspective: “For her fond biographer, Frankenthaler’s art delights the eye, as it was designed to, and that’s enough. Enough? It’s everything.”

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.”

Subhankar Banerjee's "Sheenjek River II"

Subhankar Banerjee, Sheenjek River II (2002)

Subhankar Banerjee’s landscape photograph Sheenjek River II (2002) is stunning. It’s used to illustrate Ian Frazier’s absorbing review of Banerjee’s Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (“In the Beautiful, Threatened North,” The New York Review of Books, March 7, 2013). Luminous, exquisite, pale gray-blue-mauve intermingling with pearl and aquamarine, almost abstract like a Helen Frankenthaler – it takes my breath away.