Yeah, Frankenthaler was part of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. Often a kind of older group of artists are referred to as the first generation and the younger set, which include many of the women, as the second generation. And she was among the youngest in the 1951 Ninth Street show, which gives that wonderful book its name. She was the youngest of, I think, some 70 artists. So that just tells you, you know, she's fresh out of Bennington College. She studied there with the painter Rufino Tamayo. She shows up in New York again, a familiar place to this. To this New Yorker. And she. It's. She's in the midst of everything. She's, you know, she starts dating the critic Clement Greenberg, the prominent Abstract Expressionist critic, which of course, gives her kind of entree to this world. Meets Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, meets Willem and Elaine de Kooning. So she's in their studio, she's seeing everything happen. She's part of all of these debates. And she says, you know, the most exciting thing was to be a young person, she was in her twenties, and really arguing about pictures with all of these people who really care about these debates about whether it's, you know, line or color, about the scale of canvas, about abstraction versus representation. So she's really in the thick of it.
B (4:39)
Right. So this is kind of a movement, one of the movements that we talk about when we talk about modern art. And it refers to an impulse in the United States, specifically in New York, often right after the Second World War, when artists are really trying to contend with the kind of cataclysm of the Second World War and formally do that through abstraction. So on the one hand, the abstract of Abstract Expressionism means that for the most part, the colors and forms in their work are not necessarily referencing anything in the observable world. The Expressionism part of Abstract Expressionism is the idea that there's something deep within that individual humanity at large that's being conveyed through those forms and colors.
B (5:47)
Yeah, well, when she studies at Bennington College, she studies with an artist named Paul Feeley, and she gains a kind of basic Cubist vocabulary of structuring pictures, a kind of a set of lines and forms that she'll carry with her. So she's already thinking towards. Toward the modern. But it really does take a kind of a bravery and a sense that she wants to be on the cutting edge, that she wants to be part of the avant garde. Even as I should say, she's someone who thinks a lot about art history, whether it's her immediate predecessors she loves. Well, not immediate, but she loves Matisse and Kandinsky or artists who are really important to her. But, you know, she loves going to Europe and seeing the caves at Altamira and seeing the works in the Prado. And so art history remains really important to her, even as she's pushing the boundaries of modernism and looking toward the avant garde. And I should say, even though she grew up in the shadow of the Met, she did love visiting the Museum of Modern Art, too.
B (7:04)
It's a good question. She is one of these artists who, in a way, seems timeless. For me, she was someone who has always sort of been around. You've heard her name, you've seen her works, but maybe you haven't taken the time to kind of dig in and think about it and really understand what they're all about. And I think, certainly, as we've all enjoyed learning more about the artists of this moment in Mary Gabriel's book that you mentioned, and beyond, and kind of taken the time to think about each of them individually as well as in a community, it was really exciting to think about what Frankenthaler herself contributed to this movement and this language.
B (7:55)
Well, it's a great question. We have over 60 works by the artist in different mediums. So even though this installation is quite concise, five major Monumental paintings. She was experimental in many mediums, so we have. I'm a Works on Paper curator. We have amazing watercolors by her in the collection, which relate very closely to her paintings. And she was also an amazing printmaker, a really experimental printmaker who pushed the boundaries of that medium, too. So we have six paintings in the collection, five of which are on view in a grand sweep, but we have over 60 works by the artist in total.
B (8:39)
Well, you know, the atrium at moma, if you've been to that space, you know, it's a kind of a grand space, a daunting and imposing space. And there are not many artists whose work can really charge it, can really fill it, not only with their size, but with their color, their intensity, their ambition. And we were so lucky to receive a generous gift of the Helen Frankenthaler foundation recently of a late painting by Frankenthaler.
B (9:10)
Exactly. Exactly. So this is a painting called Tor dark. It's from 1988, and it was the latest painting we had by the artist in the collection. And what we realized is that with this kind of bookend, you could now kind of see an ARC from the 50s through the 80s of this artist's whole career. She came out in this moment, this exciting moment of Abstract Expressionism. And often we focus on and fetishize this moment that an artist first breaks out with their signature language. But so many of our artists continue to work over decades and decades, continue to innovate. And so it was an opportunity to look at her work as a whole, to kind of see it in context, from the alpha to the omega, and to really see how that breakthrough language of that signature soak stain technique she pioneered in the Abstract Expressionist moment carries through and changes all the way through the late 80s when we get a picture like toward dark.
B (10:16)
Exactly. There are five pictures. You go from 1957 to 1988, and it's almost like the tiniest retrospective where you get a story about an innovation or a change, often based in a material experimentation in a single picture. So we're really encouraging visitors, especially in that space, to spend some time with these pictures, interact with them, soak them in, immerse in them. They're full of color, and they're subtle, and they change. And so you can really kind of understand that story in microcosm.
B (12:14)
It's a great question. So I mentioned her soak stain technique, which is what she innovates in the 50s. And this is the idea that rather than the paint sitting on top of the canvas, when you think of those thick strokes of paint, she's thinning her paint with turpentine, her oil paint in the 50s, and it's really, really soaking into the very fibers of the canvas. So it's actually staining the fabric of the canvas. We often forget that a painting is made on fabric. Right. So this is her, her initial kind of signature contribution. She leaves a lot of raw canvas exposed through that process. And they almost feel like giant watercolors in that way. As she moves to the 60s, a few things happen. She transitions from using oil painting to acrylic paint, which is a water based paint and behaves differently. And then she starts to emphasize shape and edges and corners more in her work as she's thinking more geometrically. She's certainly not a minimalist, as other artists in the 60s are, but there's something about her work that is responding to that sense of change. Formally in the air, more and more raw canvas is exposed. She gets braver about her compositional choices. Her scale grows. You mentioned Chairman of the board being over 16ft. There's a new emphasis on line in the 70s. Often, because color is so key to her language, we forget the key role that line plays. We see that in Chairman of the Board. And then when we get toward the 80s, we see a certain kind of mood shift. The raw canvas is no longer extreme, exposed. It's not aerating the composition in the same way as it is in the earlier pictures. And there's a kind of a sense of mystery, this painting, so much like a nocturne. And so you see all of these different changes happening. And it's something that Frankenthaler herself reflected on, that through her life, there was change in her paintings, but there was also continuity. It was, she liked to say, the work of one wrist.
B (15:35)
I'm so glad you mentioned that, Alison, because it was such a joy to be able to incorporate the artist's voice. It's not always a luxury that we have if that material doesn't exist. And in her case, there's a wealth of really rich audio. And, you know, I think even just hearing the sound of her voice, hearing her kind of her chutzpah, for lack of a better word, you really get such an immediate sense of her, of her. Her ambition, her commitment to making pictures that take risks, that wrestle with different things. And I just think hearing even just the sound of her voice and the way she expresses herself in words as she does in paint, adds so much to the texture of the presentation.
B (18:27)
Wnyc is supported by the jewish museum. Now on view, a display of 130 hanukkah lamps and the new exhibitions identity, culture and community. Anish kapoor, early works and more. Tickets and holiday hours@thejewishmuseum.org this is wnyc fm hd and am new york. Every holiday shopper's got a list. But Ross shoppers, you've got a mission like a gift run that turns into a disco. Snow globe, throw pillows and PJs for the whole family, dog included. At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more, it's about giving more for less. Ross, work your magic.
