The Brooklyn Rail

Any discussion of Helen Frankenthaler’s achievement as a painter includes a few caveats about her privilege and the beauty of her work. Helen Frankenthaler: Painting without Rules at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao provides a broad if shallow look at her career. Through the inclusion of other artists’ work and popular press at the time, it also reinforces the narrative that good looks, an excellent education, substantive means, and friendships with significant male artists were in part responsible for her success.

Early on in the retrospective, a blowup of Alexander Liberman’s 1964 Vogue photograph of the parlor in her Upper East Side brownstone shows a Mark Rothko over the mantel; Frankenthaler’s own breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea (1952) to the left; Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70 (1961) by Robert Motherwell, her husband at the time, to the right; and a David Smith sculpture on the floor. Frankenthaler was thirty-five. She had already been the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum and would exhibit in the Venice Biennale within a few years. In focusing on her early years, some recent biography leaves us with the impression of an extraordinarily accomplished young woman taking her place in a pantheon of largely older male peers, but whose later years are of less interest.

The consistent excellence of the work on the wall suggests a more interesting story, for however assiduously Frankenthaler pursued success through publicity and connections, she was extraordinarily sure-footed in finding herself as an artist, perhaps despite her relationships with the dominant artists and critics of her early working years. Drawing largely from holdings of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the exhibit includes at least a few paintings from each decade of the more than fifty years of her career, not a clunker in the lot. In fact, one can only wish for more paintings to have been hung in the generous gallery space in order to better understand how the work evolved.

Several pieces of Frankenthaler’s seldom seen sculpture also are included, showing her instinctive gift for working in three dimensions. Clearly, sculptors David Smith, Anthony Caro, and Anne Truitt—all intimate friends whose works are also included—inspired her, but without impeding her own innate playfulness or force in sculpting metal. Frankenthaler could toss off a piece such as Matisse Table (1972), made during a two-week stay at Caro’s studio in London, with characteristic grace and wit. The phallus-like tower impaled on its seemingly unsteady circular table base, a half disk clinging to its side, looms above three petal-like containers and two off-kilter wedges, suggesting at once the solidity and impermanence of a still life, and maybe, too, love and its dissolution. The insouciance of the piece, despite its monumental tower, suggests that whatever the repercussions, the moment was fun while it lasted. Sculpture was a fleeting affair, her work in woodcuts (not included here) a longer one. Her willingness to push herself in other mediums, even briefly, was clearly important to her primary career as a painter.

Perhaps Frankenthaler’s unfailing ability to create a moment without insisting upon the tragedy of its loss allows one to wander through these decades of paintings, feeling that each is an event unto itself. As she put it, Jackson Pollock was the artist from whom she “departed,” seeing in his work that to pour paint, or also to drip or splatter in his case, was a way forward. The Pollock included in this exhibit, Circumcision (1946), is a not an obvious choice to show his influence upon Frankenthaler. Not only was this transitional work painted with a brush, but the artist’s use of the line and churn of symbols was still very much influenced by Pablo Picasso. Frankenthaler’s own innovation was to pour highly diluted oil paint onto uncured canvas, as in Mountains and Sea, where she first discovered how far this technique could take her and how much of Pollock she could leave behind. Less—fewer lines, symbols, colors, and paint itself—could be more. As in Henri Matisse, too, that less obvious influence, space could become detached from line. A decade later in an interview in Artforum, she would note of her technique, “how accidents are controlled … fascinates me.”

Mountains and Sea is a landscape, however abstract and however much she resisted the term, as are many of the paintings that followed. Mastering acrylic in the early sixties and experimenting with a less saturated canvas, she found a way to make her paintings exude a light of their own, so often an eastern light. Mediterranean Thought (1960), Cape, (Provincetown) (1964), and Santorini (1965) all suggest a dawning day, the endless possibility of sun and water. In Mornings (1971)—made during the year of her divorce from Motherwell, the plural of the title perhaps also suggesting mourning—she abandons the horizon for three vertical undulations. The palette is unusual for Frankenthaler, a gold to tan to mottled beige color scheme reminiscent of seventies decor. A few horizontal lines suggest the fading creases of a slack body. Something had ended.

The often darker palette in her later work and the occasional use of a cityscape as subject, as in Madrid (1984) and Star Gazing (1989), lead to a nuanced but welcome moodiness, highlighting the occasionally forced exuberance in her earlier work. Frankenthaler could be self-important in later years, complaining in a 1991 letter to Anne Truitt of her depression at “the attempted destruction of the elite aristocracy.” Remarkably little of this shows up in her late painting, however. The majestic Driving East (2002), one of her final paintings, is dark, brooding, and, yes, beautiful, showing once again how true she was to her own vision.