ART REVIEW : Frankenthaler Retrospective Raises Questions

If you go to see “Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective”--and you should--be sure to ask yourself some questions. For starters:

--Why did Frankenthaler’s brand of New York School abstraction, which seemed to hold an edgy promise in the 1950s, devolve into decorative grandiloquence a decade later?

--By what strange paradox did a type of oil painting that owed so much to watercolors--the one, great tradition of American Modernism--begin its rapid decline at precisely the moment the artist switched to water-based paints?

--Down what garden path of reasoning did the Los Angeles County Museum of Art cheerfully traipse to conclude that, in 1990, a Frankenthaler show would turn out to be anything other than utterly beside the point?

Difficult questions all, especially for the first substantive retrospective of a living woman artist this museum has ever seen fit to display. Still, such queries at least give you something to think about in the blank face of most of Frankenthaler’s paintings from the last 20 years.

“Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective,” which opens Sunday at LACMA and continues through April 22, had its debut last summer at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Organized by E.A. Carmean Jr., director of the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, Tex., where the show was last seen, it includes a modest 40 paintings. The earliest is the now-legendary “Mountains and Sea” of 1952, the most recent a darkly romantic 1988 painting called “Casanova.”

As even casual observers of postwar painting know well, “Mountains and Sea” is noteworthy principally because of its technique. Following a 20th-Century trail of pictorial effects that meanders through Kandinsky, Miro, Gorky and especially Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler fashioned a way to get inside the pictorial arena, physically, in order to draw with fluid color: The picture’s pale wash of hues was composed by pouring thinned oil paints from a coffee can onto a large piece of canvas laid flat on the floor, then allowing them to soak directly into the raw cotton duck.

“Mountains and Sea” was the artist’s epiphany. The first so-called stain painting, it soon inspired Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to make abrupt alterations in the direction of their art, yielding the veils and targets we know today. And thanks in large part to her 1960 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Frankenthaler’s work eventually was claimed as progenitor of an ill-fated jumble of abstract modes, variously to be known as Colorfield, Lyrical and Post-Painterly Abstraction.

This latter plethora of competing, tightly nuanced terms gives some indication of the degree of desperation surrounding old-line New York School abstraction in the tumultuous 1960s. Hemmed in by the new geometries of Minimalism on one side, and by the brashly commercial images of figurative Pop on the other, the flaccid dogma of the New York School was soon outflanked.

Ironically, Frankenthaler’s own initial achievement had come from some cleverly insightful maneuvering of her own. The simplest way to think of her art is as a species of watercolor. As with such prewar painters as John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, Frankenthaler attempted to marry traditionally European modernist ideals to a distinctly American feeling for landscape. And like them, she chose fluid color as the connubial agent.

While her American forebears had indeed painted scores of landscape canvases, their most convincing evocations of Edenic nature, either witnessed directly or recalled, were more often confined to watercolor on paper. In the modernist hierarchy of artistic mediums, watercolor is nice, but painting occupies the highest rung. “Mountains and Sea” seemed to open an avenue to accommodate both.

In the months before she painted “Mountains and Sea,” Frankenthaler had completed a series of watercolors from nature. (Her work on paper was the subject of a 1985 exercise at New York’s Guggenheim Museum; none, alas, is included here.) In staining canvas with thinned paint, Frankenthaler found a way to bring this watercolor tradition to the grand, mural-size scale of oil painting necessary to a post-Pollock world.

In the show, the paintings made between 1952 and 1962, while frequently muddled, do possess an astringent energy. It speaks of an artist attempting to make a stubbornly resistant medium do her bidding. Pictures such as “Round Trip” and “Winter Hunt” exude the lively stop-start of an improvisatory staining, dragging of the brush, pushing of color and nudging of shape. The titular trip, or hunt, can be compelling.

But there’s a hitch: Oil paint, thinned with turpentine, will spread, but it certainly isn’t fluid. In her early work, the visual evidence of the paint’s resistance to fluidity is seen in the separation of the gum and oils from the color. Through capillary action, oily turpentine is pulled into the canvas weave, leaving a kind of halo around the residue of pigment. It looks odd, but this “ring-around-the-color” actually helps to underscore the dissonant, material conflict behind the arrival of a finished picture.

Frankenthaler’s is an art that depends on the difficult struggle involved in internalizing landscape--that is, in using painting’s demanding terms to create a comfortable place in which to be. In this regard, any aura of resistance is salutary. Yet in 1963 she banished it outright, in a sudden switch to the new acrylic paints.

A plastic, water-soluble pigment that is as fluid as can be, acrylic generated swift and self-satisfied fields of color. A few of these paintings from the later 1960s can claim a quick, all-at-once charm that is logo-like in bearing, but none really sustains the ponderous freight they’re asked to tow. Like overfed pashas, their now-formulaic rhetoric is gassy and bloated.

The decade-by-decade review at the County Museum of Art breaks out as follows: seven canvases from the 1950s; 13 each from the 1960s and the 1970s; and seven from the 1980s. The result is a show that opens with a small burst of excitement but is over, abruptly, by the third room. Alas, the galleries continue on. And on.

Worse, as a retrospective the show is something of a sham. The curator declined to write a catalogue essay in which the artist’s career would be examined within its larger, exceedingly tangled historical context. Instead, he blithely refers the reader to other books about Frankenthaler (by the critic Barbara Rose and the curator John Elderfield), thus allowing a sly mix of authoritative canon and accumulated legend to speak on his behalf. What he offers in its place is a series of heavily footnoted entries on each of the 40 paintings in the show.

The upshot is that lowly mortals such as you and me are meant simply to assume Frankenthaler’s exalted stature, while these 40 paintings shall henceforth be regarded as masterpieces. This may help to explain the extremely unusual hanging of the show, in which the often sizable canvases have been hung surprisingly high on the wall. Like old-style altarpieces, they force you to look up to them, quite literally, while simultaneously insisting you keep your distance.

For a serious artist whose reputation was, for good or ill, bulldozed under some 20 years ago, the rather astounding blind-faith demanded by this exhibition is leavened only by the strangely refreshing willfulness of its formidable arrogance. And that is why you ought to see the show, as long as it happens to be in town: The minor blip of Frankenthaler’s art aside, you can at least get a quick, insightful lesson in techniques of curatorial intimidation.