Painter Helen Frankenthaler in Essen: The revelation of the flowing color

Sot the work of Helen Frankenthaler was spread in Europe. It was also rarely featured in relevant group exhibitions on American color field painting. Her New York friend and colleague Grace Hartigan was the only painter represented in the canonical panorama “The New American Painting”, which toured Europe in 1958. The restrained interest in Frankenthaler’s pictures is surprising, because the artist opened up new avenues for color field painting with a painterly discovery in the early 1950s, which is why she is considered a game changer in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. The magic formula is “soak staining”: dyeing by soaking.

Frankenthaler poured diluted paint onto the unprimed canvas lying at her feet, so that it spread over it, only to a limited extent controllable. Then the painter went to work with different instruments, dragging broom-wide brushes, squeegees, sponges or her flat hand through the pools of paint in order to paint in a very unconventional way. Her color fields often look like dreamy afterimages, seem like watercolours; beguiling and pale, the colors seem to hallucinate, fall into a trance.

A flow of clarity and lightness

The high-flyer, born in New York in 1928, received impulses from two exhibitions by Jackson Pollock in 1950 and 1951 in the Betty Parsons Gallery – his dripping had given the young painter the idea of ​​not just dripping the paint, but using it in larger doses when creating the picture . Frankenthaler also appreciated Pollock’s late calligraphic paintings, which are seen as his descent, and her own work kept in touch with the visible world to the end. In his biography, published in 2021, Alexander Nemerov vividly describes how Frankenthaler carried the image of her breakthrough – “Mountains and See” – for weeks before she brought it to the screen in October 1952. Clement Greenberg, Frankenthaler’s partner at the time and eloquent critic (he himself dabbled as a painter at her side), invited Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to the artist’s studio. Both were completely convinced of the technique of poured paint and made it their own. Frankenthaler’s painting, Louis observed, is a “revelation,” the “bridge between Pollock and what is possible.” Louis and his colleague Noland demonstrated what was possible in the American color field painting of the 1960s – thanks to “soak staining”.

Frankenthaler’s paintings on paper, enriched with a small selection of paintings, are now being unfolded in the Museum Folkwang Essen with eighty-four works in a retrospective from 1949 to 2002. Georgia O’Keeffe’s early landscape watercolors are the most recent example of what is possible in terms of fully valid painting on paper presented in their exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler. Paper may not be as absorbent as textiles, but Frankenthaler’s color expansion technique does its job here, too. What she paints is not a matter of the tragic romance and transcendental grandeur associated with the New York School. Instead of wafting romantic blur, a flow of clarity and lightness runs through her best pictures.

She doesn’t know any rules, said Frankenthaler

The show follows it chronologically and shows considerable changes (also fluctuations in level) in each decade. Inevitable for anyone who spoke up about modernist painting around 1950 is the entry via late-cubist and surreal compositions, from which Frankenthaler emancipated himself in 1951 with the watery sheet “Great Meadows”, before shortly thereafter expressing relaxed gestures in stately formats reveals. This is the case with a “Jalousie” from 1952 painted on roller blind fabric: she scribbles on it as if drawing skills were of secondary importance, which today seems downright contemporary. But what appears to be a casual note is arranged to form a picture through color and shape balance – skilfully and casually.

This is followed at times by wild mixtures of patchwork, speckled, sprayed and just poured paint; in the 1960s, the classic, light Frankenthaler style dominated with simple but effective color territories in a bright room, the strong contrast between figure and ground, the watery color gradient and the memory of the landscape as in the great “Grotto Azura” from 1963. Self the banal association of a flowerpot does not detract from the image “Evil Spirit” of its presence and potency.

Frankenthaler was obviously not interested in a “signature style”, as the subsequent decades of this retrospective testify, she does not know the rules, she is concerned with improvisation and risk, she asserts confidently – everything must be possible, even “something ugly”. One would like to give the painter credit for not stopping at the “lyrical lightness and atmospheric fragrance” that she is credited with in the catalogue. In fact, however, a regressive moment crept into her oeuvre in the 1970s, the style of painting appeared conventional in various sheets. The horizontal line as a cipher of the landscape, no matter how often it is used, has a stereotypical effect; some Informel, also put on colored paper, is literally painted over and can be confused with all the jumps that the painter allows herself in her zigzag course. In her late, largely monochrome large formats from around the year 2000, Frankenthaler entered into a dialogue with the classics of the subject, painting after William Turner, James McNeill Whistler, and Rembrandt. There’s a lot of old school and some pathos in the color spaces and their late modernist reminiscence.

Helen Frankenthaler. Picturesque constellations. Museum Folkwang, Essen; until March 5, 2023. The catalog costs 29.80 euros.