Picture by Picture:

Revisiting Frankenthaler

Harry CooperThis is a new book, but it’s also an expansion of an old book, so I thought it would be interesting for you to remind us of how the old book came about.

John ElderfieldWell, I met Helen in 1976, when, as a newly appointed curator at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA], I’d done my first exhibition, which was on Fauvism. Helen saw the show and left a note saying she’d thought it was wonderful. That was it. I got a call a few days later saying “Did you get my note?” And I said “Yes, I got your note.” And she said, “Well, I put my phone number on it.” I replied, “Well, you know, maybe it’s just a cultural difference. In Britain, if somebody says something nice about you, you don’t call back, because it’s like you’re asking them to do it again.” And she said, “Well, you obviously haven’t been in New York for very long” [laughter].

HCAnd she asked you to write about her?

JEYes, eventually, after she’d read the Fauve catalogue. But Barbara Rose’s book [Frankenthaler, 1972] had been published not so long before, by Abrams, and the idea of doing another book so soon just seemed crazy to me. By the end of the ’70s, though, I’d gotten to know her more and had seen more of her work, and she brought it up again. I was going through a period at MoMA when I was doing a lot at the museum but I did have time for an outside project, and I thought there was definitely more to say about Frankenthaler. So I said yes. She and I started to look methodically at the work that was in her possession. She’d kept a lot of paintings, going back to her early exhibitions, since she hadn’t sold much then. We began unrolling canvases, which made me realize that I should actually write an art-historical book rather than a critical book, or at least one that contained both approaches.

HCBecause the work impressed you as needing that?

JEYes. I’d known about Mountains and Sea [1952], but hardly anything preceding it. Going through and seeing how enormously productive she’d been, I found myself writing more than I’d thought I would, going almost picture by picture. But I think I’d just gotten through the ’50s when—because I’d become so tied up with MoMA projects again, and of course had to put them first—I had to set it aside. I did quite a number of MoMA shows in the 1980s, one on top of another, and it became impossible for me to restart the Frankenthaler project.

HCThey do that to young curators, right?

JEYes, I know it. And it got to a point where Paul Gottlieb, who was running Abrams then, took me to lunch and said, “Well, John, you’re never going to get this done, so why don’t we get somebody else to do the other half of it.” Very clever. I therefore started up again.

To begin with, I realized that what interested me in Helen’s work before Mountains and Sea was seeing the many different artists she was working through in such a short amount of time. Amazingly so. In 1951 she’s looking at [Arshile] Gorky, looking at [Vasily] Kandinsky—

HC—[Joan] Miró—

JEAmassing these influences. I think some of this certainly had to do with her romantic relationship with [the critic] Clement Greenberg, their going to exhibitions together and talking about work together. And through Greenberg she was introduced to Jackson Pollock and David Smith and other artists of that generation.

I also realized that her path in the ’50s after Mountains and Sea wasn’t as smooth as it had appeared in Barbara’s book. For example, there was this strange period in the mid-’50s when she went back to a heavily painterly, more conventional AbEx kind of work, which she came out of in the later part of the decade. The original book told the story in that way. One big change between what was in that earlier book and what’s in the new one was that by the time I’d started on the new volume, Lauren and I had worked together on how many exhibitions together at Gagosian, Lauren, along with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation?

Lauren MahonyAbout seven or eight.

JEAnd the first one we did, on the ’50s, was done in—

LM—2013, about a year after Helen died, and before the Foundation became active.

JEThose exhibitions provided a way of looking again at a great deal of her work. One exhibition that was transformative, for me at least, was the one we did in Paris [in 2017], which dealt with works from the end of the ’50s and early ’60s. For reasons I don’t quite understand, Helen and I hadn’t really looked at these when we were working on the first book. She went through this rougher, more painterly period from ’59 to ’61, which was entirely absent from the first version of the book. That had to go in.

HCThere’s one thing you treat in the new book that you deliberately did not treat much in the old book, which is the reception of her gender and issues of feminism, whether negative or positive, as they changed over the years.

JEFor the 1989 book, right when I started, Helen and I talked about what it should include and what it shouldn’t. She said, “Well, I really want it to be about the art,” which was what I wanted too. And I said, “So we’re not going to write about your life except for certain key things that people have to know, such as you were with Clem for five years, and then you married Bob Motherwell. But I’m not going to talk about your lovers.” And she said, “I also don’t want to be treated as a woman painter.” I said, “Well, I have no interest in doing that.” However, when I began on the new book some three years ago, I certainly became aware that the situation was now different, and it was necessary to deal with her reception as a woman painter, negative and then positive. I felt it just had to be there, in part because of how younger artists of the ’70s had responded to her work. The anthology that Katy Siegel published with Gagosian [“The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler, 2015] was wonderful in that respect, really showing how people were embracing the idea of being a woman artist. Helen, in contrast, didn’t want to be thought of in any sort of feminist terms.

HCSo she wasn’t aware of the reception of her pouring and staining in terms of an essentializing of feminism?

JEI think she had to know some of it. I’ll quote the wonderful thing [Henri] Matisse once said: “I am only interested in myself.” And I think Helen was a bit like that.

HCI have a question about scale, and this must be a challenge for any curator of Frankenthaler: you can’t fit that many works in a show. And I really can’t think of another painter, except maybe Frank Stella, who needed to work at that scale that consistently. You don’t really discuss that directly; it’s just part of the atmosphere of the book. But why do you think she needed to work on that scale, the ten-to-twelve-foot expanses?

JEWell, there was a moment when I frankly do think the size got to be too big. Some works were enormous, like the huge picture she did for a world’s fair [Expo 67] in [Montreal,] Canada.

LMThe painting later installed at the World Trade Center in Manhattan, Guiding Red.

HCWhat do you think she needed the scale for?

JEI think maybe some of it was, “I can paint as big as the boys.”

HCYep [laughter]. Bigger, bigger.

JEBigger, yes. And I think also to see what the result would be like if color occupied such a large area.

HCShe seems to have adjusted the scale of a painting’s internal elements along with the size of the canvas in an interesting way.

JEOf the larger ones, I think Hint from Bassano [1973], where there’s a lot of activity, was more successful than ones with areas of uninflected color.

HCShe certainly needed a degree of scale to enter the painting and stand on the canvas as part of her working method. She said of Mountains and Sea, which was inspired by a trip to Nova Scotia, “The landscapes were in my arm as I did it.” So it’s the whole motion of the body for her, which gets into one theme that you bring out: of Frankenthaler as a landscape painter in some essential way, a painter of not particular landscapes but of the feeling of landscape.

JEI think she is. It’s in the whole tradition of Western art: standing in front of and looking at something, looking at the space. I think that she was continuous with that idea.

There was an interesting exhibition of Helen’s work in relationship to landscape and the work of J. M. W. Turner in Margate, England, in 2014. Lauren, you and I were there together?

LMYes, ten years ago, at the Turner Contemporary.

JEIt’s a wonderful gallery and it’s more and more active. And I remember there was a panel there on this topic, and Clifford Ross [a nephew of Frankenthaler’s and a board member for the Frankenthaler Foundation] was saying she’s in the tradition of the sublime, and I said, “I absolutely disagree with that.” And the moderator, Tim Marlow, said, “John apparently doesn’t agree with that” [laughs].

LMYou made a joke that you’d never heard Helen refer to anything as sublime except dessert [laughter].

HCSo would you say she was more immediately in the present tense of sensory experience, then?

JEI think she was suspicious of art that was designed for effect.

HCAnd what do you make of this artist painting these huge swaths of sublimated landscape in New York City? I mean, she didn’t move out to Connecticut for quite a while. Some trips. But it’s almost a refusal of the immediate environment, is that right?

JEYes. Although for some while she was going to Provincetown for, I don’t know, a couple of months every year. But I don’t think the Provincetown pictures are any bigger than the ones done in New York.

LMThere’s a great photo of her with Flood [1967], the Whitney’s painting, which was made in Provincetown; it’s huge in scale but not as panoramic as some of the ’70s ones you’re talking about. I think she made that epic World Trade Center painting, Guiding Red, in New York: she had the space here to do it.

HCAnd you do point out that it’s never pure nature: there are these bursts of artificial color in her paintings, synthetic intrusions that you connect to the pastoral, to an idea of seeing nature through culture.

JEAlso, you’re constantly made aware that these are “made” things. In reproduction, of course, that’s less evident, but certainly standing in front of the works, they aren’t all disappearing soak-stain works; there are marks on the surface, which constantly remind you that she’s there doing the mark-making.

HCThroughout your career, you’ve spent a lot of time on Willem de Kooning and you’ve spent a lot of time on Frankenthaler. They figure in the book as opposite poles, in a way.

JEWell, I think they do, but they’re also linked by both being people believing in continuity through change. They both had to keep changing all the time to avoid having a signature style. I think at times that pushed them to move past stages of their work you’d wish they’d done more of, but I think they both thought the worst thing would be to copy yourself.

HCThey’re both so visually literate and aware of history, probably more than most of their colleagues, so they carried with them the burden of the past, and of pushing against that.

I want to ask you about process, too, because I found myself wanting to know how she’s working, how she’s creating these paintings. You’re sparing, but you let us know key points: when she primes or doesn’t prime, when she moves to acrylic, when she’s working on the floor, when on the table. And yet it seems like the heart of the book is more formal, not really an investigation of materials and methods. How did you strike that balance? Some people would have just gone nuts with her process and the sponges and whatever she’s using, and you leave that somewhat mysterious.

JEWell, I didn’t intend to be mysterious, but very factual. Obviously process is an important topic to address, but I think you can too easily become more preoccupied with the process of how a painting is made than with how it’s delivered to the viewer. I felt that I should only address her process when it changed.

LMShe regarded drawing or color drawing, not color itself, as the basis of her work. We’ve talked about her risk-taking, her relation to landscape, her use of art history—maybe we could talk about her drawing?

HCMountains and Sea has been at the National Gallery for many years on long-term loan from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and I’ve been fortunate to be living with it and taking care of it. And Mountains and Sea has this charcoal drawing in it, which I think you suggest came early in the process? And she then doesn’t really do a painting like Mountains and Sea again, it seems to me. Yet it’s so important. Help me out with that.

JEWell, I do talk periodically of how she has certain composition types that in a way look back to Mountains and Sea, where she has drawing along the bottom and things resting on it. That’s something that keeps coming back time and again. Also the pluming elements—

HCFlowering, sort of. You point out that even though she quickly realized that she didn’t need the actual drawing in Mountains and Sea, the drawing comes back, drawing with paint.

JEYes, I think the graphic impulse is there. At times it’s less prominent, but during periods like the early ’70s, it comes back onto the surface with the paintings influenced by Morocco. Then it disappears, then comes back again.

HCThe drawing elements are more suggestive than declarative.

JEThere’s ambiguity, but she didn’t engage with double imagery, the way Jasper Johns used to create something that looked like one thing and then turned into something else. With Helen it’s not like that, it’s very much, This is what it is. And then you look at it and you think, Well, yes.

HCRight, it’s not entirely clear to the viewer from the outset but there are no doubles or switches involved.

JEWhen we were looking at her painting Nude [1958], Helen pointed to the rectangle at the bottom with something in it and said, “Well, that’s an animal.” And I couldn’t, and still can’t, figure it out.

HCIt does have some squiggly lines coming out of it.

JEYes. And I figured I wasn’t going to go through the menagerie and say, “You mean a crab?” [laughter]

In addition to drawing, another type of work on paper she got involved in was printmaking. She sometimes painted quickly and I think printmaking was the counterpoint to that. Some of these prints had up to twenty different proofs. The woodcuts in particular had many, many layers, some with more than eighteen separate woodblocks. They took a long time to make. But I think she liked printmaking because of that, because it was an absolutely different activity from what she was normally doing.

HCI haven’t seen a lot of the work on paper, but what you reproduce in the book is gorgeous. Those works are so different. I mean, the color isn’t as bodied, there’s a lot of transparency and atomization, and just a totally different register to the work.

JEI think the print Madame Butterfly [2000] is extraordinary, as well as the amazing Tales of Genji woodcuts [1998], which have up to fifty-three colors. Examples of both are reproduced in the last chapter of the book.

LMWe talked about the genesis of the first book. I’d love to hear you talk about the making of this new book, and why now, and what you wanted to be different about it. In particular, could you speak a little about the last chapter, on works from the ’90s and beyond? How did you select those works?

JEWell, this book started with Elizabeth Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, asking if I would be interested in writing a final chapter dealing with the work done after the first book was published. And my immediate response was, “I’ll look at the book again and see what I think, but basically it’s like trying to put a young arm on an old body.” Would it really work out? So then she came back and said, “Well, what if you made some small adjustments to the 1989 book, then maybe we could do it on that basis?” At that point I read it through from the beginning to the end, and some parts of it I really enjoyed. At others, I cringed, and I felt that if this were going to be done, it would have to be done in a more substantial way. But this was right at the beginning of covid, and I thought, “Well, I’m here at home, so why not?” So I started going through the existing 1989 text, marking things to be retained, things to be revised, and things to be gotten rid of. I just went through slowly, chapter by chapter. And when I was in the middle of it, I realized what I’d allowed myself to be talked into.

HCRevising the whole thing.

JEExactly, and it has occupied me for the past two or three years. At least, it was the largest of my many projects over this period—I advanced it periodically while also working on a fairly wide range of other artists, from Chardin and Cezanne to de Kooning and Jenny Saville. But we kept moving the process along to the end. It was a complicated, time-consuming process in different ways—more so than for any book I’ve written—involving a group of people at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation as well as at Gagosian, the publisher.

The selection of illustrations for the 1989 book I’d done by working with Helen and Maureen St. Onge, then her assistant and now the director of collections at the Foundation. Helen really pressed to have certain works included, not all of which I was really keen on. (I think it’s often the case with artists that they want to give priority to recent work.) In the new book we had to rebalance the selection of illustrations to make space for those in the final chapter. Maureen and Cecelia Barnett, collections manager at the Foundation, facilitated my seeing many paintings to aid the selection. And obviously, none of the image files used for the 1989 book were of any use anymore, so all had to be rephotographed or sourced, and Grady O’Connor at the Foundation took on the daunting task of assembling the around 400 needed.

At the same time, my first reader, Jeanne Collins, and then the editor David Frankel, pondered every sentence I wrote, while Maureen and the Foundation’s archivist Sarah Haug fact-checked everything and the book’s designer Katy Homans followed our progress. Eugenia Bell coordinated the Foundation’s communications with Gagosian, where Lauren, who is talking with us today, managed with great diplomacy and insight the long editorial creation of the volume and supervised its production.

HCThe book is very visual.

JEI was given final say on layouts, but it turned out so well because a wonderful group of people were involved in the project who cared about it and talked to each other, including a great designer.

HCI can’t wait to see it as a physical object. Lauren, how is it different from the original?

LMOne of John’s goals for this edition was to make it a smaller trim size, more handleable. That was a big task because Helen’s works fluctuate in format: there are a lot of verticals and a lot of very panoramic horizontals, so we had to play with formatting to keep them as grand as they are in real life.

JEWe decided early on that we weren’t going to have any foldouts. The designer, Katy Homans, did a great job.

HCAnd it’s all in color this time.

LMYes, a lot of the early works in the original book are reproduced there in black and white. Luckily, we were able to find and shoot them and reproduce them in color for the first time.

HCCongrats to both of you. I can’t remember reading a long monograph in recent years with this kind of devoted detail, a classic monograph with plenty of analysis and appraisal and description and just all of the things that people don’t do that much anymore.