The Gendering of Helen Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea

Home , Friedel Dzubas, Lee Krasner, Mountains and Sea

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my patient and helpful advisors, Anne D’Alleva, Jean

Givens, and Mario Ontiveros for all of their guidance and support in completing this thesis. Each one possesses a great passion for art history, which inspired and motivated me, even when I encountered setbacks in the writing process.

I also couldn’t have completed this process without my thoughtful and gracious peers, who helped me through some of the most difficult times in my personal and academic career.

Lastly, thank you to Kelly Dennis for her constant and unwavering support.

Without her I may have never completed this thesis.

Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter

1. Creating and Maintaining False Binaries: Gender Tensions in the

Context of the New York School………………..………………….. 7

2. Critical Examination of Gendered Language in Helen Frankenthaler

Scholarship 1970s – Present……………………………………….. 19

3. Feminist Interventions Regarding Helen Frankenthaler’s Work and

Career………………………………………………………………… 29

Conclusion…………………………………………………………...... 44

Works Cited………………………………………………………………………. 45

Figures………………………………………………………………...... 48

iii

Introduction

This thesis explores Helen Frankenthaler’s artistic career, through thoughtful re- examination of scholarship and criticism focused on her 1954 creation Mountains and

Sea (Figure 1). Frankenthaler’s painting is generally described and discussed using gendered terms, usually describing the femininity, and by proxy, the inherent inferiority of her work, particularly when compared to her “masculine” abstract expressionist colleagues most notably Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Morris Louis.

In an attempt to work through and tease out Helen Frankenthaler’s complex subject position as a female artist working in the post-war New York School, this thesis seeks to provide a re-examination of Helen Frankenthaler and her work. Issues surrounding the use of gendered terms to describe and discuss painting are explored, as well as the problematic nature of projecting the gender of the artist onto the artist’s works. Gender stratification among artistic circles and the role and importance of the critic in shaping an artist’s career in the post-World War II setting are also discussed.

Working through larger problems of identity, agency, and gender illuminate the marginalization of Helen Frankenthaler and Mountains and Sea throughout

Frankenthaler’s nearly 60 year career. Tracing the way in which Frankenthaler and her works were dismissed in the art historical discipline provides an opportunity to understand the ways in which the constraints of the art historical canon can define and in some ways limit an artist’s career. Included in this thesis are three frameworks for examining Frankenthaler’s work and career. First focusing on the creation and maintenance of gender binaries, second examining scholarship without obvious feminist influence, and lastly exploring feminist recuperations of Frankenthaler’s work in the

1990s – Present. These three frameworks provide opportunities to examine gender politics and gendered language as a way of maintaining binaries and understanding the marginalization of Helen Frankenthaler and her work.

The thesis relies heavily on the ideas of Linda Nochlin and Nanette Solomon and their feminist scholarship regarding art history and the art historical canon. Art historical practice was dominated by a patriarchal structure from its inception. By examining and tracking criticism, reception, and scholarship surrounding Helen Frankenthaler and her work, the practice of art history as a discipline is also critically examined. Art history is, like all histories, a glorified story. Artists and art works that do not fit well into the desired narrative or agenda of the dominant structure are often marginalized or omitted. Due to the power and prevalence of the Greenbergian abstract expressionist narrative of the

1950s and 1960s, artists who did not conform to this narrative were dismissed as unimportant and not influential.

This thesis is concerned in large part with situating Frankenthaler in the context of the New York School and examining how her subject position as a female artist working in post WWII America affected the criticism and reception of her work. Of particular interest is the concept of Helen Frankenthaler as a transitional figure. The concept of the “transitional” artist also speaks volumes about the discipline of art history, which has, since Vasari, decided which artists are valorized and which are marginalized.

Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City on December 12, 1928, the youngest child in an upper-middle class Jewish family. Her father, Alfred Frankenthaler, a Justice on the New York Supreme Court, died while she was in grade school.

Frankenthaler attended the Horace Mann and Bearley Schools before she attended secondary school at the Dalton School. At Dalton she studied art under Rufino Tamayo, a Mexican figurative abstraction painter. Frankenthaler graduated at the age of 16 and decided to pursue her interest in painting at Bennington College in Vermont. At

Bennington Frankenthaler worked with artist Paul Feeley, who practiced Cubist style painting in the manner of Braque and Picasso. Frankenthaler also worked with Wallace

Harrison, an influential architect, during a non-resident work term. Upon graduating from

Bennington, Frankenthaler received formal training as a modernist painter as well as an extensive foundation in the history of art.

Frankenthaler returned to New York City after graduating from Bennington in July of 1949. In an attempt to prove herself to her family, Frankenthler enrolled in the art history graduate program at Columbia University. Immersing herself in her painting rather than her studies, Frankenthaler soon left the program. She spent the summer of

1950 working with artist Hans Hofmann at his studio and home in Provincetown,

Massachusetts. Hofmann also introduced Frankenthaler to prominent art critic, Clement

Greenberg, who introduced her to Jackson Pollock’s work at the Betty Parson’s Gallery.

Frankenthaler had her first solo show in 1951, at the age of 23. Her artistic style at the time was reflective of her cubist training at Bennington. After seeing Pollock’s work,

Frankenthaler was inspired to be more experimental and daring, which led to the development of her mature style and her breakthrough technique of soak stain painting.1

Barbara Rose’s biography of Frankenthaler’s early life and career communicates that Frankenthaler’s social status and gender did not put her in any obvious position of

1 Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1971

3 opposition or oppression. She was able to attend prestigious schools due to her family’s wealth and her own intelligence. Frankenthaler’s natural talent and knowledge of painting easily allowed her to connect with mentors who were more interested in the formal aspects of her work than with her gender. Living in New York City also provided her with a multitude of opportunities not available to many artists, female or male, during the 1940s and 1950s. Rose suggests that Frankenthaler’s identity as a woman was not a defining aspect of her work, unlike the work of female artists from different classes and races who had to overcome struggles to even to be able to study art.

Frankenthaler’s subject position as an upper class, white, female paired with her extensive schooling and training in painting gave her the ability to mingle and compete with peers of both genders. As the most educated painter in the New York School,

Frankenthaler’s paintings had an inherent legitimacy that other artist’s works lacked.

There is a common anecdote that explains that a person cannot consciously break the rules if he or she doesn’t know them in the first place. In Frankenthaler’s case, her knowledge of art history and the history of painting grounded her work in art historical tradition, unlike many artists with no formal training who were not nearly as formally educated. Though Rose’s biography raises valid points, Frankenthaler’s gender is not ignored in this thesis.

The terms “gendered” and “feminized” will be used a considerable amount in this thesis. It is, therefore, important to explain how and why these terms are used in regard to Helen Frankenthaler’s painting. “Gendering” an artwork is, in essence, a form of personification, which by denotation is the act of assigning an inanimate object with the characteristics of a human being, in this case gender, i.e. – the female body and socially

4 constructed feminine characteristics such as softness, subtleness, and delicacy are assigned to Frankenthaler’s work. In the case of artworks, the practice of personification generally assigns characteristics of the artist to the art work. For this reason, the gender, race, social class, etc., of the artist is incorporated and sometimes considered inseparable from the work itself.

The inability of critics and viewers to separate the gender of the artist from the art work is not unique to the context of post-WWII New York. This practice is inextricably linked to power struggles. In her publication Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870 – 1930, Kristin Swinth suggests that historically, the rhetoric surrounding art making changed drastically when an increased number of women enrolled in art schools just before the First World War. Swinth states,

“between 1890 and World War I, an entirely different critical rhetoric developed. The language of sympathy and technique that had not required overt gender assignments became a terrain of distinct masculine and feminine aesthetic traits. For example, ‘a union of womanly delicacy and refinement of feeling with a manly vigor in the painting’ characterized Cecelia Beaux’s work according to Clarence Cook’.”2 Here, Swinth suggests that the practice of characterizing artworks as “masculine” and “feminine” was a practice intended to maintain the gender binary. This concept is important to this thesis’s argument; as it cites the moment when quote, “insistent and intense” gendered rhetoric became codified.3

Why, then, if it is seemingly impossible to separate the identity of the artist from the art that he or she produces, is this a concept worth teasing out? For the purpose of

2 Kristen Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870 – 1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 143. 3 Ibid.

5 this thesis, the answer to this question is that there is much to gain and to understand by examining the ways in which binding the artwork to the gender of the artist who created it can limit and shape reception, perception, and value of the artwork and artist.

Note that “value” does not refer to monetary value, but rather to the amount of veneration and praise for the artist and artwork as well as the important of his or her contribution to the art world.

Exploring Frankenthaler’s life, work, and career, while examining the social dynamics of the New York School, this thesis seeks to illuminate how Frankenthaler’s identity as a white, upper class, female painter – an identity that cannot be separated from her work – created limitations for the reception, perception, and value of her artistic production throughout her career and how these limitations have changed due to an evolving framework for examining Frankenthaler’s life and artistic career.

Chapter One: Creating and Maintaining False Binaries: Gender Tensions in the Context of the New York School

Throughout Helen Frankenthaler’s nearly 60 year career, references to

“feminine” qualities of her work were commonplace. Due to Frankenthaler’s reluctance to address the complexities of her position as a female artist working in post-war New

York City, it was easy for scholars and critics to dismiss Frankenthaler’s complex position as a young woman in the New York School and dismiss her work in relation to her male counterparts. This chapter focuses on gender stratification and tensions among artists in the New York School. It also explores reasons why the initial reception of Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea (Figure 1) as a “feminine” painting, particularly the insistence of critics and fellow male artists to use gendered language became the normative tone for discourse surrounding Frankenthaler’s work.

The abstract expressionist movement was the product of critics, artists, and politics. The center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York City after the Second

World War, as artists and intellectuals fled to the United States from war-torn Europe.

This was not only a geographical shift but also a stylistic change; a change which favored pure abstraction with a debt to cubism and surrealism over traditional figurative painting. Most artists strayed from figurative images after the war, as they did not think that the horrors of humanity should or could be translated into art.4 Abstract expressionism sprang from the politically stable democracy of the United States and became a symbol of both artistic and political freedom, particularly when contrasted with the turbulent socialist and communist countries of devastated post-war Europe. The

4 Clement Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” Art International (Zurich) 8, nos. 5-6 (Summer 1964)

7 concept of an art that had total “freedom” from politics, however, was merely a myth; which this thesis hopes to illuminate by examining marginalized figures, in this case,

Helen Frankenthaler.

The desire to separate, to differentiate New York School paintings using gendered terms, however problematic, cannot be ignored. Gendered vocabulary was created to serve a series of complex functions. In Griselda Pollock’s essay “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference,” she discusses the need to regain patriarchal dominance in post-war American culture. Pollock states:

“the profound and impossible antagonism between the terms woman and artist, still unchanged within modernism even if publically disavowed in the name of transcendent truths, played their disfiguring games in the 1940s, and especially in the 1950s, in the United States in a way which did not, however, prevent two generations of artist who were women from sharing in the ambitious enterprise that was American abstract and gestural painting in those decades.”5

Here Pollock describes the ideological and discursive practices that posed challenges for female artists in the New York School. Female artists’ subject positions put them in a position of adversity, where, even though they were still able to create work, their work was considered less important to the discipline than their fellow male artists.

Clement Greenberg, the most prominent art critic during of 1950s and 1960s and the champion of the abstract expressionist movement’s formalist narrative was so predominant that artists like Helen Frankenthaler were marginalized because they did not fit neatly into Greenberg’s story. For Greenberg, Jackson Pollock was the epitome of an abstract expressionist “action painter” due to his theatrical style and free attitude.

In 1951 Greenberg introduced Helen Frankenthaler to Jackson Pollock, who was one of her many sources of artistic inspiration.

5 Griselda Pollock. “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference.” The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999), 79.

The paint stain technique that Frankenthaler developed, which entailed pinning a linen canvas to the floor and pouring thinned paint over light charcoal lines, allowing the paint to soak in and stain the canvas, became an influential development for abstract expressionist and color field painting, and the hallmark of Frankenthaler’s career. Her soak stain technique resulted in fields of color that appeared to be suspended on the canvas with no sense of depth or illusionism. By obliterating the foreground and background of the canvas, Frankenthaler was answering Greenberg’s call to modern painting to acknowledge and embrace the flatness of the canvas.6

Though Helen Frankenthaler incorporated some formal techniques that

Greenberg championed, her work was still dismissed as feminine and passive and thus marginalized. Frankenthaler moved her canvas to the floor like Pollock, but her paintings were considered color field paintings instead of action paintings. Her technique of soak staining was also considered more passive than the techniques of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshlie Gorky, and Morris Louis, due to its more accidental and less deliberate nature. Critics would discuss the way in which her works “happened,” not the way that she “created” them. It was a common notion that Frankenthaler’s paint did the work, not the artist; which was exactly the opposite of

Pollock’s “calculated” drip paintings.7

The language used to describe Frankenthaler’s paintings often include the words

“pastel” and “feminine” and the shapes are considered “soft,” “subtle,” “lyrical,” and

“fluid.” These descriptors are much different than the adjectives used to describe

Jackson Pollock’s works which included: “heroic,” “gestural,” “harsh,” and even

6 Ibid. 7 Many critics described her technique as passive and credited the paint for creating the “organic” image instead of the genius of the artist.

“ejaculatory.” The words used to describe Frankenthaler’s work and painting style are passive compared to the words used to describe Jackson Pollock’s work.

Frankenthaler’s work is framed as less aggressive and less masculine, but the problematic nature of the false gender binary poses an important question: what identifies Pollock’s gestures as “masculine” and Frankenthaler’s as “feminine,” other than their identities and male and female, respectively? As Grisela Pollock suggests in her 1997 essay “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference,” “such experience is not gendered in essence, but our minds, memories, and bodily sensations are marked by the process that, in shaping our subjectivity, demands its submission to an always-already and yet constantly renegotiated organization of sexual difference.”8

Here Griselda Pollock suggests that assigning a gender to a painting is naturalizing something that is not natural. There is no inherent gender of inanimate objects, such as paintings, but the social context in which a painting was created demands, as a political and social function, that the female artist’s canvas must also be coded “feminine.”

Lisa Saltzman, a feminist art historian and professor at Bryn Mawr College, explains in her essay Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen

Frankenthaler’s Painting, that false binaries; represented by the insistence on separating “masculine” art created by men and “feminine” art created by women, was a strategy for maintaining gender boundaries and roles at a time when these boundaries seemed to be disappearing.9 During World War II, women developed a prominent presence in the work force due to the absence of the service men who were deployed

8 Griselda Pollock. “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference.” The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999), 78. 9 Lisa Saltzman. “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler’s Painting.” Reclaiming Female Agency (1992): 373-383.

10 overseas. If women hadn’t adopted to these “masculine” roles in the workforce, the

United States economy almost certainly would have collapsed.

Though the efforts of women in the workplace were appreciated in their absence, when the service men returned from their active duty, they were eager to return to work and be the breadwinners of their households. As a result, women were pushed out of their newly acquired jobs and back into their households as homemakers. Strict gender boundaries and behaviors were thus developed and emphasized to try to re-establish pre-war cultural conditions.

Frankenthaler’s most famous painting, Mountains and Sea, is the subject of a longstanding myth. The same story is told over and over again about Morris Louis and

Kenneth Noland’s visit to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953. During the visit the two artists noticed Mountains and Sea and immediately realized that Frankenthaler had developed a “breakthrough” technique. Instead of valorizing Frankenthaler for her achievement, her soak stain technique was dubbed by Louis as “the bridge between

Pollock and what was possible.” The concept of a “bridge” as a sort of transition implies the Hegelian notion of teleology. If Frankenthaler was simply a “bridge to what is possible,” this implied that there was an ultimate destination to be achieved/reached that she was unable to attain. Because of this notion, Frankenthaler’s breakthrough was then used by her male contemporaries in the New York School to reach this ultimate destination.

The trajectory of scholarship regarding Frankenthaler’s work, specifically the mythicized Mountains and Sea, caused the painting to function predominantly in relation to other pieces, most of which were painted by males. Mountains and Sea is rarely

11 discussed as an “autonomous” art work. Autonomous, in this sense does not mean that the work was created in a vacuum, as art and art history are disciplines that take inspiration from their own histories. Instead, the use of “autonomous” means that the work has value in and of itself, that it is recognized as an achievement and that it does not solely rely on comparison to other to define its importance to the art historical canon.

Mountains and Sea is recognized as a difference. In the context of the New York

School, Frankenthaler was working under different social constraints than her male counterparts, and it was generally accepted that her artistic contributions were validated in comparison to male artist’s works and accomplishments.

Helen Frankenthaler was asked about the influence of Jackson Pollock on the development of her soak stain technique in a 1965 interview in Artforum with Henry

Geldzahler, a prominent curator and art historian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York City Commissioner of the Arts, she stated:

“Like Cubism which it came out of, painting in the de Kooning, Gorky idiom was first revealing, then inhibiting to me. I felt many more possibilities in Pollock’s work. That is, I looked at and was influenced by both Pollock and de Kooning, and eventually felt that there were many more possibilities for me out of the Pollock vocabulary. De Kooning made closed linear shapes and ‘applied’ the brush. Pollock used shoulder and ropes and ignored the edges and corners. I felt I could stretch more in the Pollock framework.”10

Frankenthaler’s response is quasi deconstuctivist; in that, instead of looking for an absolute truth or style, she was interested in works that opened doors and allowed her to use the formal vocabulary but not to produce a copy. Her desire to depart from a dominant style proved that she was consciously trying to define her own, unique style.

Unfortunately, her work was not received as such initially, and the importance of the

10 Quoted in Henry Geldzahler, An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, Artforum (NY), 4, no. 2 (Oct. 1965)

12 soak stain technique she developed was not realized until it was adopted by Morris

Louis.

Louis used the soak stain technique to create a more geometric, ordered composition than Helen Frankenthaler constructed. His works are characterized by bands of color that create a fan-like shape (Figure 2), versus Frankenthaler’s abstracted organic fields of color (Figure 3). Examining these images, where would one begin in trying to determine which work is “masculine” and which is “feminine?” Color, perhaps?

Associating a particular color with a certain gender is a socially constructed concept.

There is nothing inherent about the colors blue and pink that lends them to being the universal sign for boys and girls, respectively. Even still, it is a longstanding American practice. Through socialization and social conditioning, members of a society learn to associate certain colors with particular symbols, people, or genders. These pairings are usually arbitrary, and if not, they have loosely based ties to forgotten pasts. For example, purple was considered a royal color in Medieval Europe because the dye to create the color was exotic and expensive. Now that pigments are inexpensive and there are a myriad of clothing color choices, the symbolic nature of purple is no longer as meaningful.

Both paintings contain shades of pink, which is traditionally considered a

“feminine” color in American culture. This discounts the notion that the hues used in the painting are representative of the gender of the artist who painted it, as it has been established that one is by a male artist and the other is by a female artist. What about examining style and technique as markers of gender identity? In this case, both artists are painting in the same style of abstracted color field painting. They are also using the

13 same soak stain technique in which thinned paint is absorbed onto a canvas. What formal aspect of these two paintings could possibly differentiate one as “masculine” and the other as “feminine?” After this analysis, it appears as if the only truly defining characteristic is projecting the gender of the artist onto the painting itself.

Examining photographs of Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock published in two issues of LIFE Magazine depicting each artist in his/her respective studio space, the tensions surrounding gender roles in the New York School and the need to project an artist’s gender as a defining characteristic of his or her work are brought to the forefront.

Photographs of Jackson Pollock, taken by photographer Martha Holmes, were published in the October 1949 issue of LIFE accompanying the article that asked: “Is he

[Jackson Pollock] the greatest living painter in the United States?” In the dramatic, black and white photographs (figures 4 and 5); Pollock is shown hard at work in his studio. An incredibly large canvas lines the studio floor as he hovers above it, splattering, dripping, and “ejaculating” duco enamel. Pollock is depicted in the act of answering Rosenberg’s call for modern painting to be “an arena to act.”11

Bud Hopkins spoke of the success of Pollock’s LIFE spread explaining: “He [Jackson Pollock] had everything. He was the great American painter. If you conceive of such a person, first of all, he had to be a real American, not a transplanted European. And he should have big macho American virtues – he should be rough and tumble American – taciturn ideally – and if he is a cowboy so much the better. Certainly not an Easterner, not someone who went to Harvard. He shouldn’t be influenced by the Europeans so much as he should be influenced by our own – the Mexicans, the American Indians and so on. He should come out of native soil – a man who comes up with his own thing. And he should be allowed the great American vice, the Hemingway vice, of being a drunk. It’s no wonder that he had a popular LIFE magazine success, because he was so American and unique, and quirky and he had this great American face. Everything about him was right.”12

11 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” ArtNews (NY) 51, no. 8, (Dec 1952) pp 22 – 23. 12 Griselda Pollock. “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference.” The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999), 86.

Hopkins’s descriptions of Jackson Pollock are problematic at best. What exactly are “big macho American virtues” and how does someone have a “great American face?”

Hopkins’s statements illuminate the myth of the great artist and artist as genius, which surrounded Pollock. Many people genuinely thought, and some still do think, that

Pollock was a symbol for all that was manly and all that was American – two symbols that were more popular and powerful than ever in post-war America.

The photographs of Jackson Pollock emphasize his strong, masculine traits with his strong arms, composed attitude, and raw emotion. Though Pollock’s finished works appear as if they were created in haste, the LIFE photographs make it apparent that his actions were calculated which only added to his mystique as the heroic artist. Griselda

Pollock suggests that these photographs of Pollock:

“became, perhaps, the most famous sign of the ‘body of the painter’ of the modernist century – [the photographs] frame the space of the producing body and his activity not as the studio, a social space of encounter between culture – the artist and his work – and its resource – nature/woman/other – but as the canvas from which that other has been banished. The unframed and uncut canvas lies on the floor receiving the flurry of his gestures, which mark and record the artist’s presence to declare, however, a Dionysian rather than Apollonian masculine creativity. The sexual hierarchy directly pictured in the prototypical modernist image of the artist in studio with nude female model is not visualized directly in Namuth’s images. But the legacy is surely there in the potency and activity in the masculine body now directly mastering the canvas, which has subsumed into its uncharted space the once-necessary feminine object, the sign of painting’s referent, that from which art is made because art is other to it.”13

Griselda Pollock explains how the images of Pollock working in his studio only served to perpetuate the male dominated patriarchal structure of the New York School and the abstract expressionist movement. The photographs work well to further this discourse because they effectively transformed Jackson Pollock’s painting into a visceral

13 Griselda Pollock. “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference.” The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999), 79.

15 experience rather than an artistic style. Jackson Pollock’s studio was a space for action, where he was able to smoke, drink, and act as he pleased. His gesture and mark are aggressive and authoritative; irreverent symbols of his ownership of the techniques and mastery of abstract expressionism.

Helen Frankenthaler was the subject of a photo-spread in LIFE Magazine eight years after Jackson Pollock’s aforementioned appearance. Frankenthaler was featured with female artists Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell. Her May 13, 1957 appearance includes a series of color photographs of Frankenthaler in her studio (figures 6 and 7) to accompany the article titled “Women Artists in Ascendance.” Unlike the photographs taken years earlier of Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler is not photographed during the act of painting. Instead, Frankenthaler is elegantly posed on the paint stained floor, which could easily be mistaken for one of her canvases. She is wearing a pastel pink blouse and a pristine white skirt; a ridiculous outfit to wear in a studio. Her canvases surround her, hanging on the walls, with a similar, pastel color palette to her not-studio- appropriate ensemble.

Not only did these photographs position Helen Frankenthaler as a delicate female, almost hovering over the paint stained floor in a white skirt, but they also positioned her as a passive actor. She is sitting on the ground with her legs neatly beside her, looking up doe-eyed at the photographer. These photographs of

Frankenthaler are the antithesis of the photographs of Jackson Pollock, as she is not using the canvas as an arena to act, nor does it appear as if she is planning to act any time soon. These photographs, taken by Gordon Parks, do not perpetuate the heroic artist genius myth, as was the case with those of Jackson Pollock, but instead depict a

16 young, attractive, passive female who happens to be an artist. These photographs seem to suggest that it does not matter what or how she paints, but that her association, as a young female, with the New York School is impressive and noteworthy enough.

Though portrayed as passive in these photographs, Helen Frankenthaler was an intelligent young woman. She almost certainly realized that she was being posed as the counterbalance to the macho, male abstract expressionist painters, but the tremendous

PR of receiving a feature in LIFE magazine before she was 30 years old overweighed being depicted as a passive female. Frankenthaler subscribed to the “if you can’t beat them join them” philosophy surrounding the gender post-war American gender divide, which, as Griselda Pollock describes: "the 1950s was a decade of extreme gender polarization when the postwar American state attempted to put the genie back in the bottle by making all the Rosie the Riveters of the war years go home, bake brownies, and live the suburban dream that Betty Friedan would expose in 1963 as a nightmare.”14 Thus, instead of trying to break free from gender stereotyping,

Frankenthaler was embracing it, in order to positively impact her career. In 1957, a

“feminine” magazine spread in LIFE was far less detrimental to her career than the reputation as an unruly, unreasonable young woman without the PR.

The issues of gender stratification that led to the marginalization of Helen

Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea, was due to the dominant, patriarchal structure of the New York School and the art world as a whole. The insistence of critics and New

York School artists to maintain false gender binaries lead to the creation of gender tensions. Nanette Solomon’s “Sins of Omission” explores the creation of the art

14 Griselda Pollock. “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference.” The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999), 79.

17 historical canon and discusses how and why it has been dominated by upper-class, white, males since its inception during the Renaissance by Giorgio Vasari. Solomon’s ideas are crucial to the first chapter of this thesis, but they are even more relevant to the next chapter, which explores feminist recuperations of Helen Frankenthaler’s work.

Chapter Two: Critical Examination of Gendered Language in Helen Frankenthaler

Scholarship 1970s – Present

Discussion and interpretation of Helen Frankenthaler’s work was not limited to feminist scholarship. For this reasons, it is beneficial to look to newspaper and journal articles to explore the gendered language used to discuss Frankenthaler and her work in the not particularly feminist oriented public sphere from the 1970s to the present.

In this chapter the trajectory of evolution of criticism and reception of

Frankenthaler’s work is examined. Early discussions of Frankenthaler’s painting, epitomized by Hermit S. Champa’s “New Work of Helen Frankenthaler” perpetuated the gendered approach to that had limited a thoughtful reading of Frankenthaler’s work until the 1990s. Other, later articles describing exhibitions and retrospectives centered on

Frankenthaler’s career frame her as an important, autonomous (as in, not dependent on

Jackson Pollock for creative existence) artist whose inclusion in the artistic canon is irrefutable. Instead of only existing against the backdrop of the artist/genius heroism of

Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler finally receives appreciation and respect for her contributions as a female artist.

One of the earliest publications in Artforum magazine that focuses exclusively on

Helen Frankenthaler’s painting is Kermit S. Champa’s “New Work of Helen

Frankenthaler” published in 1972. Champa was an author and art historian who taught art and architecture at Brown University.15 His essay discusses a recent exhibition of

Frankenthaler’s painting at the Emmerich Gallery which Champa describes as

15 Kathryn Shattuck. "Kermit S. Champa, 64, Author And Distinguished Art Historian." August 17, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/nyregion/kermit-s-champa-64-author-and-distinguished-art- historian.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed April 21, 2010).

“interesting,” which seems to be a backhanded compliment. 16 He proceeds to deeply criticizes Frankenthaler’s work as a color field painter because her use of color is “not confident.” Champa stated, “Frankenthaler’s color has never been permitted to carry unimpeded the real expressive content of her art, and instead, a process of what can perhaps best be described as continuous formal self-analysis has seemed always to prevent her color from developing a natural – or better – an organic character distinctly its own.”17 From this quote, it is clear that Champa found Frankenthaler’s technique and style to be lacking in sophistication and skill.

Champa then discusses Frankenthaler’s extensive schooling in image-making.

Unlike Barbara Rose, Champa implies that Frankenthaler is actually too educated, and due to her historically grounded compositions, she is essentially representing everything that Abstract Expressionism rejects. He states, “It is possible to explain most, if not all, of American color painting in the 1960s as a response to and development from Barnett

Newman’s radical suppression of self-contained composition in favor of generally unimpeded fields of pure color. Instead the very traditions of abstract painting, which

Newman’s work rejected so effectively, have continued to attract and at times support

Frankenthaler.18 Champa does include a compliment to Frankenthaler when he says,

“No truly major painter since Manet has tried to understand and embrace so much history.”19 Here, Champa’s argument is muddled. He compares Frankenthaler to perhaps one of the most important artists, yet Champa does not consider

Frankenthaler’s style to be as legitimate or effective as most of her second generation

16 Kermit S. Champa, "New Work of Helen Frankenthaler." ArtForum (Jan 1972), 55-59. 17Ibid., 55 18 Ibid., 56 19 Ibid.

20 abstract expressionist and color field contemporaries regardless of her inclusion of history.

Now the question becomes: why is Frankenthaler’s use of styles or influences that are unlike her contemporaries (e.g. – figural, historicized subjects) cause to denigrate her work and ability as an artist? This oppressive, denigrating criticism could very well be due to Frankenthaler’s gender, considering the inescapable need to gender her paintings as feminine and inferior. It is clear that, to Champa, Frankenthaler only existed as difference, and that he thus considers Frankenthaler inferior. When he said,

“confronted by lush, abstract landscapes, and delicately capricious biomorphic forms of more specific sorts, it seemed that the formal conciseness of Louis’ work was about to spawn a confident and untroubled child but, in fact, Frankenthaler’s figurations concealed a much less secure and decisive formalism, a formalism that never managed to focus definitively on a single issue, or for that matter, even upon a single sequence of issues.”20 Here, even if Frankenthaler’s work were more “secure and decisively formal” she would still be the confident and untroubled child of Morris Louis, which is offensive at best. Champa also describes her works saying, “Her earliest stained works were very

Pollock-like in their freely drawn linear emphasis.”21 These references to her dependency on male artists, especially by suggesting that a male artist needs to “give birth” to her style, signals that Champa did not think that Frankenthaler and her work could even exist as anything but an inferior comparison to the work of male abstract expressionist painters, particularly Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis. This essay could

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

21 be considered the framework for the initial, marginalized view of Helen Frankenthaler’s artistic work and ability.

In 1978, Irving Sandler, an influential art critic, professor, and champion of abstract expressionism wrote a publication entitled The New York School.22 In this book,

Sandler devotes ten pages to discussing Frankenthaler and her painting. He tries to break away from the normalizing discourse surrounding Frankenthaler’s work (as epitomized by Kermit Champa) and argues that her work is not passive, soft, accidental, feminine, or inferior. More concerned with Frankenthaler’s talent and technical skill than gender, Sandler emphasizes the importance of her staining technique.23

Sandler also positions Frankenthaler as an independent, active artist.

Frankenthaler headlines the chapter entitled “Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Resnick, Francis, and Other Gesture Painters” in which Sandler discusses the ways that Frankenthaler’s style departed from Pollock’s, and how these differences legitimized her work not how these differences made her work inferior. Sandler suggests that her staining technique

“enabled Frankenthaler to create colors that were more disembodied, immediate, and open than those of her contemporaries.”24 For Sandler, it was not a detriment to the quality of Frankenthaler’s work that she moved away from using the same technique as artists like Jackson Pollock.

Sandler also disproves the common misconception that Frankenthaler did not create the painting, but that the paint created itself. The idea of this accidental and

22 Storr, Robert. "Good fella: Robert Storr on Irving Sandler” ArtForum April (2004), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_42/ai_n6080044/. (accessed April 21, 2010). 23 Irving Sandler. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. 1st ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 59 – 68. 24 Irving Sandler. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. 1st ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 59 – 68. 65.

22 organic process is not entirely accurate, and takes away from Frankenthaler’s artistic ability. Sandler states, “unlike Pollock and Louis, Frankenthaler rarely allowed her poured areas to stand untouched. She “drew” in color by puddling, rubbing, blotting and brushing, and by introducing linear elements reminiscent of Gorky’s and de

Kooning’s.”25 The new techniques and methods that Frankenthaler uses to define her style are seen as part of a larger tradition of abstract expressionism that she has adapted for her own purposes. Sandler’s thoughtful discussion of Frankenthaler, particularly when compared to Champa’s, provides a new framework in which to think about Frankenthaler’s work.

In a 1982 article written by John Elderfield, Director of Drawings and Curator of

Painting and Sculpture at MoMa, entitled “Specific Incidents” Elderfield tries to dispel the common myth that, due to Frankenthaler’s soak stain technique, she did not actually produce the painting, but that the painting is produced itself. Elderfield suggests, “the sheerly optical memory of the teeming biological continuum of nature finds its equivalent in the wetness and the viscosity of paint, in its tendency to flow and pool and blot, as well as in its susceptibility to control.”26 Instead of considering Frankenthaler’s soak stain technique as an art form that required less artistic talent and relied more on random, uncontrolled incidents, Elderfield argues that these “incidents” are actually well controlled and specific.

Elderfield references a 1965 interview with Friedel Dzubas, an artist who shared a studio with Frankenthaler in 1952, claimed that the term “action painting” was

25 Ibid. 26 John Elderfield. "Specific Incidents." Art In America (Feb 1982), 101-108.

23 misapplied and misunderstood.27 Dzubas thought that the term “should properly refer only to an unpremeditated and unedited painting technique, and that its implications of autographical honesty make it inapplicable to art revised extensively.”28 Dzubas interest in Surrealism and automatism as forms of genuine expression link Frankenthaler to the

Jungian psychoanalytic aspects of Pollock’s drip paintings. Elderfield considers

Frankenthaler’s adaptation of these techniques as a departure from Pollock stating,

“Frankenthaler’s revision of Pollock towards an art of accumulated and floating symbols, while indeed opening the way through its technique for the later abstract art of Louis and Noland, also opened the more immediate way for the referential art of Rivers and

Rauschenberg, who adopted in the mid-1950s the diaristic, episodic approach to picture-making, the thinly-washed technique, that Frankenthaler had pioneered.”29 Here,

Frankenthaler is noted for her influence on later artists, instead of the typical scenario where she is the one who is influenced by her male contemporaries.

Elderfield discusses her work in relation to male contemporaries, but it is a symbiotic relationship. Frankenthaler is consciously working in the traditions of Pollock and de Kooning, the most influential artists of the first generation of the New York

School, but she is deliberately trying to make her own style. This is something that

Elderfield both recognizes and appreciates, and, unlike Champa, Elderfield considers her work self-confident and well developed.

In a 1998 New York Observer article titled Gaga Over Guggenheim’s

Frankenthaler Exhibition Hilton Kramer, a distinguished art critic and champion of

Greenberg, discusses the exhibition After ‘Mountains and Sea’: 1956 to 1959 curated by

27 Max Kozloff, “An Interview with Friedel Dzubas” ArtForum, (Sept. 1965), p 52. 28 Ibid., 103 29 Ibid., 104

Julia Brown. The exhibition focuses on Frankenthaler’s works after her “breakthrough” painting. In this article/review, Kramer gives a brief biography and history of

Frankenthaler and her work and in doing so does not compare her to other, male artists.

Kramer does mention that she was influenced by de Kooning and Pollock, but he does not emphasize a gender difference. In this article Helen Frankenthaler is discussed first and foremost as an artist, not as a woman.

Giving credit where it is due, Kramer explains that “Mountains and Sea marked a turning point in Ms. Frankenthaler's work, and was also to spark a new development in

American abstract painting: the emergence of so-called Color-field abstraction.”30 She alone is credited with the emergence of color field abstraction, and Kramer does not feel that it is necessary to back up her development with the name of a fellow male artist.

Instead, Kramer emphasizes how important Frankenthaler’s stylistic impact was when he explains, “for some years now, Mountains and Sea has been on loan to the National

Gallery of Art in Washington. That, I suppose, is an appropriate venue for the picture, since its principal influence was exerted on two Washington painters who were little- known at the time – Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.”31 Instead of positioning Louis and Noland as the solution to a math problem in which Pollock is the equation and

Frankenthaler is simply the equal sign, Kramer makes it quite clear that Frankenthaler had a profound impact on these two young artists who end up being more established in the art historical canon than she is, almost entirely due to gender difference.

30 Hilton Kramer. "Gaga Over Guggenheim's Frankenthaler Exhibition The New York Observer (2008), 1-2, http://www.observer.com/node/40117?page=all. (accessed April 15, 2009). Pg 1.

31 Ibid., 2

Kramer also discusses the development of Frankenthaler’s techniques and her mastery of color, which are emphasized in the Guggenheim exhibition. He also admires the way in which Frankenthaler was, in his opinion, “the only member of the New York

School's first generation to remain faithful to the movement's improvisational abstract esthetic” explaining that “what made Mountains and Sea such a sensational picture at the time-and what has made it something of a classic ever since-was its confident rejection of the Tenth Street manner in favor of a watercolor-like transparency that brought something new to big-scale abstract painting.”32 Forty-six years after the creation of Mountains and Sea, the painting is discussed as an autonomous creation by an incredibly talented artist, not by a transitional figure. The influence of this change in the way in which Frankenthaler’s work is discussed is even more important considering the accessibility of this article to a broader audience as it was published in the New York

Times.

Ten years later, in December of 2008, another important article was written about

Frankenthaler and her works, this time in the Wall Street Journal. This article, written by

William C. Agee, Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History at Hunter College, discusses the current Frankenthaler retrospective at the Knoedler & Co. Gallery in New

York City entitled Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades. Agee also discusses

Frankenthaler’s superb mastery of color stating that “her technique also started a drive toward an overall clarity and directness of color that informed much of the best art of the next 15 years, from the older Hofmann himself to younger artists such as Ray Parker.”33

32 Ibid. 33 William C. Agee. "Frankenthaler's New Way of Making Art, The Wall Street Journal (2008), 1-3, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122609409221009463.html. (accessed April 14, 2009). Pg 2

Frankenthaler is once again not discussed as a transition or a bridge, but as a stand- alone figure in the history of abstract expressionism and the forerunner of color field painting.

Agee does, however, refer to the “bridge” concept in the article. He states that,

“Mountains and Sea has long been recognized as an icon of American art – a bridge between past and future that changed the course of abstract art, and her own work, by means of an essentially new technique.”34 Agee’s use of the concept of the “bridge” turns the typical use of this phrase in relation to Frankenthaler’s work on its head. Here he is describing this one work, Mountains and Sea as a bridge between the early and later parts of her career, as a turning point for Frankenthaler as a painter. He is not dismissing her ability as an artist or her technique as a bridge or a transition, but is agreeing that this work served as a break between her earlier style and her more mature style that influenced many artists after her. Agee also emphasizes that the technique that she created was entirely original and complete. It was not a step on the way to something bigger and better, it was whole and it was important.

These essays and articles existing the public sphere regarding Frankenthaler and her work show that she is now considered a much more validated, autonomous, and influential artist than she was during the initial reception of Mountains and Sea.

Though it took some time for critics and scholars to work through her complex work and subject position, Frankenthaler is no longer discussed only in contrast to her male colleagues, many of whom have been deceased for at least a decade. This most likely would not be the case if Frankenthaler and her work were not the subject of feminist

34 Ibid., 1

27 scholarship and the importance of gender difference in the New York School was not recognized, which is discussed further in the third chapter of this thesis.

Chapter Three: Feminist Interventions Regarding Helen Frankenthaler’s Work and Career

Situating Helen Frankenthaler’s work in a feminist art historical context illuminates the role that gender difference and identity played during the Abstract

Expressionist movement. This movement was often considered to be formal, pure, and free from politics, but critical scholarship by feminist art historians proves the opposite. 35

With Helen Frankenthaler at the center of many discussions that bring to the forefront tensions and contradictions between the form and meaning of Abstract Expressionist works, Frankenthaler is established in a more prominent, important role in the history of art. Specifically, the works and ideas of Griselda Pollock, Lisa Saltzman, Nanette

Solomon, and Linda Nochlin are particularly important to this argument.

Nanette Solomon’s “Sins of Omissions” an influential 1991 essay, provides the framework for this chapter. In her essay, Solomon hopes to illuminate the patriarchal structure of the art historical cannon and bring to the fore some of the reasons why women artists have been overlooked throughout the history of art. She states:

“Among the most useful consequences of the first strategy, the recovery of women artists, is bringing ‘normal’ selection under direct scrutiny and thereby denaturalizing and politicizing it. What heretofore had appeared to be an objective account of cultural history, the ‘Western European Tradition,’ suddenly reappears as a history with a strong bias for white, upper-class male creativity and patronage. It is a history in profound support of exclusively male interests. Feminists’ insistence on exposing exclusions reveals the ways in which works within the canon cohere with one another in terms quite different from those traditionally advanced. Rather than appearing as paradigmatic examples of aesthetic value or meaningful expression, or even as representative of major

35 Clement Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” Art International (Zurich) 8, nos. 5-6 (Summer 1964)

historical movements and events, canonical works support one another as components in a larger system of power relations.”36

Solomon insists, quite convincingly, that women artists were not marginalized simply because of their gender, but that it was a useful practice to support the system of power relations. This is why, as suggested in Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great

Women Artists?” written 20 years earlier, that it is simply not enough to add women artists to the existing canon. Instead, Solomon suggests that the art historical cannon be broken down and analyzed to understand exactly how and why it functions the way that it does. According to Solomon feminist analysis is the only way of successfully analyzing patriarchal power structures. She states, “the ideological value of the classical model in the constitution of power relations through the coding of gender and sexuality can be uncovered only by feminist analysis.”37 Which is why applying feminist scholarship and feminist theory to Frankenthaler’s work is essential to understanding how and why it was gendered and marginalized as feminine and less influential or important.

In a 1965 interview for ArtForum, Henry Geldzahler asked Helen Frankenthaler how she felt about being a women painter, to which she responded: “obviously, first I am involved in painting, not the who and the how.”38 Frankenthaler and her paintings are difficult for feminist scholars to discuss. Helen Frankenthaler stated that she was not a feminist artist, so some scholars found it difficult assign feminist ideas and politics to

36 Nanette Solomon, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission.” In EnGendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, edited by Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow, 222–36. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Pg. 350. 37 Ibid., 353. 38 Helen Frankenthaler in discussion with Henry Geldzahler, 1965. Found in: Theories and Documents in Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Christine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996)

30 her work. This does not mean, however, that one cannot ask feminist questions about the woks. Some feminist scholars are also underwhelmed about trying to recuperate

Helen Frankenthaler’s position in the art historical canon. This resulted in a lack of sophisticated scholarship regarding gender in related to Helen Frankenthaler’s work.

There is little scholarship before the 1990s that aggressively examines gender difference in relation to Frankenthaler’s subject position as a female working in the New

York School.

Frankenthaler insisted that she did not intend to make “feminine” work and that she did not want to be considered a “female artist,” but just “an artist.” Her desire to simply be considered an artist is complicated by a quote from a 1998 interview with

Julia Brown in which Frankenthaler stated: “being the person that I was and am, exposed to the things I have been exposed to, I could only make my paintings with the methods – and the wrists I have.”39 It is interesting that Frankenthaler suggests that her wrists are most responsible for her paintings, as it is the norm to instead refer to the

“hand” of the artist. Implying that her paintings come from the delicate wrist, however, perpetuates the view of her paintings as dainty and feminine. On the same token,

Frankenthaler is also acknowledging that her paintings are not produced in a hermetically sealed vacuum, but that her life experience and he subject position as a white, upper class, Jewish woman is, no matter what, a part of her works.

Clearly, discussion of and interpretation of Frankenthaler’s paintings, specifically

Mountains and Sea, are complex. This chapter includes feminist interpretations of

39 Julia Brown, “A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown,” in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959, (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998) 27.

Frankenthaler’s work from the 1970s through the 2000s that provide the tools for a sophisticated reading of gender in Frankenthaler’s work. Discussing Barbara Rose’s

Frankenthaler, Griselda Pollock’s ‘Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual

Difference,’ and Lisa Saltzman’s ‘Reconsidering the Stain’ will provide the context for thoughtful scholarship regarding Helen Frankenthaler and her paintings.

There was an apparent backlash against Frankenthaler by the first generation of feminist critics and scholars, due to the fact that Frankenthaler did not identify herself as a feminist. In Frankenthaler makes a point to leave her politics and gender outside of the discussion of her art work. Frankenthaler’s overwhelming desire to be just an artist, and not to be confined to the constraints of just a “female artist” was actually detrimental to scholarship about her paintings, as a sophisticated, thoughtful, and productive discussion of her artistic career requires the acknowledgement of her identity an artist and also as a woman.

Frankenthaler, a book written by Barbara Rose in 1971 includes color plates of

Frankenthaler’s paintings accompanied by a biography of Frankenthaler’s life and works spanning her early career to the publication of the book. In this early attempt to re- examine the work of Frankenthaler, Rose takes a formal, biographical approach, using quotes from interviews and discussing formal elements of Frankenthaler’s paintings such as style, color, and technique. Rose does touch on the subject matter of

Frankenthaler’s paintings, but she does not take much liberty with interpretation.

Instead, Rose is more concerned with the formal elements of the pieces and what the artist herself had to say about them.

During the 1970s, the feminist movement was in full swing, but as previously mentioned, Frankenthaler did not associate herself with it. Barbara Rose was also not a major proponent of the feminist movement and, although she has an interest in women artists, Rose does not consider herself a feminist art historian nor is her scholarship and criticism explicitly feminist. Rose’s work in important to feminist art historians, however, because it is one of the first attempts to re-evaluate and re-examine and otherwise generally overlooked artist.

In Frankenthaler, Rose does not directly address Frankenthaler’s gender and the role that it played in the creation and reception of her work. Even though Rose leaves out a large and important piece of Frankenthaler’s puzzle, Rose is still championing for

Frankenthaler’s works to be as respected and revered as her male contemporaries. By emphasizing Frankenthaler’s extensive schooling, the prominence of her mentors, and the impact that her style had on other New York School artists, Rose gave

Frankenthaler credit that she had not received but had always deserved. Instead of dismissing Frankenthaler and her paintings as “transitional” and “feminine,” Rose proposed a context about Frankenthaler that allowed she and her work to stand alone; not dependent on the developments of the big boys of the New York School.

Although not explicitly feminist and in some ways limiting in her stereotypical language; Rose actively tries to free Frankenthaler from the oppressive discourse that had been created surrounding her “feminine” painting. One of the most effective ways that Rose does this is by discussing how Frankenthaler deliberately took some inspiration from Jackson Pollock but consciously departed from his style to create her own. Rose discusses Frankenthaler’s reasons for moving beyond Pollock, by discussing

33 her desire to stray away from the brush and the hand of the artist, as Frankenthaler was not interest in participating in or perpetuating the notion of the “hand of the artist/artist as genius” concepts. Thus, Rose’s discussion of Frankenthaler was not in relation to or dependent on the developments of Jackson Pollock. Instead, Rose framed

Frankenthaler’s paintings as artistic developments in their own right which were the product of many influences including: artists of the New York School, Cubism, and

Surrealism.

Frankenthaler’s extensive knowledge of the history of art grounds her work in artistic tradition. The most notable inspirations for her work were Gorky, Kandinsky, and

Dali. Rose did not fail to mention Frankenthaler’s rigorous training as an art student before becoming part of the post-war New York art scene, unlike previous critics and scholars. Rose emphasized the upper hand that Frankenthaler had due to her strong understanding of the history of art, technique, and tradition. This is the perfect example of the saying “you can’t break the rules unless you understand them to begin with.”

Frankenthaler was able to produce avant garde art work and techniques because she was aware of what the previous status quo was.

In the same year as Barbara Rose’s Frankenthaler, leading feminist scholar,

Linda Nochlin, published a short essay entitled “Why Have There Been No Great

Women Artists?”40 In this essay, Nochlin claimed that it was not sufficient to simply add women into the Art Historical canon and narrative, but that women artists and their struggles and identities as women must also be acknowledged and explored. Nochlin’s

40 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Art News (special issue entitled “Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History” (1971): 22-39.

34 ideas represented a certain strand of feminist art history and criticism, which ends up being the dominant strand of feminist art history. Even though Rose’s argument in

Frankenthaler does not meet Nochlin’s criteria, there is still a feminist value to Rose’s writing because it redresses some of the shortcomings of previous, limiting literature regarding the treatment of Helen Frankenthaler as a female painter in the New York

School.

The language that Rose uses in her biography of Helen Frankenthaler complicates the notion of trying to valorize Frankenthaler’s work and free her from oppressive stereotypes. For example, Rose describes Frankenthaler’s subject matter and style as “lyrical” and related to the fete champetre, which were terms that were generally used to suggest women’s connection to emotion and nature.41 The fete champetre was a courtly subject which was popular with rococo artists like Watteau and

Fragonard which was thought to appeal primarily to women. This commonly accepted connection between women and the emotional/natural world is problematic, and it is surprising that a scholar who wished to venerate a generally overlooked female artist would perpetuate this oppressive stereotype.

It seems as if, regardless of attempts of free Frankenthaler from the oppressive, limiting effects of the gendering of her painting as feminine and inferior, scholarship surrounding Frankenthaler’s work cannot escape the stereotyping and feminizing tendencies. Frankenthaler’s use of pastel, watered down colors and the frequency of her works that imply abstracted landscape allowed her works to be easily coded as

41 Rose, Barbara. Frankenthaler. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1971 pg. 50. The nature/culture dichotomy is a common reference in many disciplines; it is an implication that men are “inherently” more connected to culture and women are more “inherently” connected to nature. This dichotomy favors men and oppresses women.

35 feminine. At the end of Rose’s publication, Rose describes Frankenthaler saying,

“sometimes Frankenthaler will strain against her own innate grace to produce an awkward form that may be less familiar.”42 This “innate grace” is inextricably tied to

Frankenthaler’s identity as a woman; something that she cannot escape and something that is not thoughtfully explored and reconsidered until the 1990s.

In Griselda Pollock’s essay “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual

Difference,” written in 1996, Pollock is interested in exploring “sexual difference, what it means, how it is produced, lived, negotiated, how it shapes and is shaped by representation and cultural practices.”43 She does this by discussing female artists during the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States because she considers this the first time in the history of art that works by female artists did not

“come to us in already framed by existing cultural discourses that define the meaning of the period and practices within which the artists worked.”44 Pollock uses examples of

Lee Krasner and the tensions between her identity as an artist and her identity as

Jackson Pollock’s widow as well as discussing the works of young Helen Frankenthaler,

Griselda Pollock establishes the Abstract Expressionist movement as a moment/space when the implications of being a female artist were constructed in a way that created a false binary between male and female artists.

Pollock States:

“In feminist interventions in art’s histories, we have to confront the problem of how to see what artists who are women produce. Their works come to us already framed by existing cultural discourses that define the meaning

42 Ibid., 104. 43 Pollock, Griselda. “Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual Difference.” The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999): 75-101. Pg. 76. 44 Ibid., 77-78.

of the period and practices within which the artists worked. Such frames can make the work perfectly invisible, and worse, illegible except as something lacking in relation to what the dominant discourse produces as the canon. It is my contention that the artists who are women work across a double field. As ambitious painters shaped by the formation we call the avant-garde, they must negotiate the conditions of their own intervention just like any other. The resources from which they will inevitable draw to do so will include dimensions of social, cultural, psychic, and even corporeal experience that is unacknowledged by a phallocentric culture.” (78).

To Pollock, the 1950s and the Abstract Expressionist movement was a mirrored reflection of the cultural and societal ideologies of the time period. Critics, curators, and other members of the misogynistic and phallocentric art world of the 1950s dismissed and marginalized the work of female artists as “feminine” and inferior, thus these artists were often overlooked; made invisible because they did not fit neatly into the dominant art historical canon. For this reason, female artists had to work twice as hard to break through the patriarchal structure of the art world.

Illuminating the particularly unique climate of the art world in post-war America clarifies how and why Frankenthaler’s paintings were dismissed for decades. The male dominated canon never allowed room for the work of a “feminized” woman painter to gain legitimacy, female artists were understudies to their male contemporaries, or only existed as transitional figures. Mountains and Sea, for example, was discussed in scholarship and criticism in a pre-packaged box that labeled it as the “transition” from one macho artist – Jackson Pollock – to two others – Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.

It was also implied that, without the skill and technique of Jackson Pollock,

Frankenthaler’s style would have never emerged. Her works were entirely dependent on those of Jackson Pollock and could not exist without him.

Even though coding Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea as feminine and therefore stylistically inferior was seemingly inescapable due to the dominant ideologies regarding gender, Griselda Pollock asks an important question when she says, “why should femininity negate the status of the art produced in dialogue with the psychic or corporeal specificity associated with the feminine?”45 This question has no definite answer, but it is helpful in breaking down the connection between femininity and inferiority in the realm of art production. The though process behind the association of femininity with inferior cultural production seemed to be that if an art work is created by a female artist it has inherent feminine characteristics which make it by default less important than a similar work created by a male artist. This is why Griselda Pollock calls for a re-evaluation of art produced by female artists, specifically female abstract expressionist painters in the 1950s, saying that it is essential to finally take into account that:

“Being an artist “in the feminine,” working in a practice that generates historical and aesthetic possibilities of ‘inscriptions in, of, and from the feminine’ does not reduce Helen Frankenthaler or Lee Krasner to ‘being women.’ Their work is instead made legible, as it plays on this historical stage when the semiotics of artistic practice within modernist painting opened up the very questions of identity, pleasure, and difference in which the bodily and the psychic traces of the produced but always unraveling subject of sexual difference could reconfigure their relations in and through painting.”46

Instead of dismissing the works of female abstract expressionist painters like Helen

Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, who have been overlooked due to their “inherent” femininity for the majority of their careers, actively engaging in the re-examination of these painters and their works can shed light on the context in which the artists were working and unravel the ideological constraints that have been bound up and trapped in these works for decades.

Feminist art historian, Lisa Saltzman discusses the works of Helen Frankenthaler in relation to the corporal body in her essay originally published in 1998 “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and Identity and New York School Painting.” Saltzman points to

45 Ibid, 78. 46 Ibid, 92.

38 an article published by E.C. Goossen in a 1961 publication of Art International in which

Goossen discussed the importance, or lack thereof, of Frankenthaler’s artistic merits and technique when he states:

“Frankenthaler’s paining is manifestly that of a woman…without Pollock’s painting hers is unthinkable. What she took from him was masculine; the almost hard-edged, linear splashes of duco-enamel. What she made with it was distinctly feminine; the broad bleeding-edge stain on raw linen. With this translation she added a new candidate for the dictionary of plastic forms, the stain.”47 Goossen’s quote perfectly represents how Frankenthaler’s work was perceived by many critics in the 1950s and 1960s. Her work was bound to Jackson Pollock; impossible without him, and could exist only in relation to him and his works. Rather,

Frankenthaler’s painting was simply a bridge to another side of the male dominated abstract expressionist equation. The reference to “the stain” as somehow inherently feminine only makes sense in relation to the female menstrual cycle. Incorporating the physicality of the artist into the fabric and meaning of the work itself was never as much a commonplace practice than during the abstract expressionist movement.

The soak-stain technique that Frankenthaler used in Mountains and Sea was considered by Goossen to be an extension of her identity as female. Frankenthaler is not simply staining the canvas, but she is bleeding paint onto linen, which is a function of not only her artistic talent but of her physical body. When comparing Frankenthaler’s painting technique to the process of female menstruation, a dimension of accident and incident is added, as Saltzman points out, because the female menstrual cycle is a function of the body that cannot be controlled. Supposing that the stains are an

47 Saltzman, Lisa. “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting” Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique (2005):560-580. Pg. 563.

39 extension of Frankenthaler’s identity as female and representative of menstrual blood would also imply that the stains that she creates are intended to be haphazard and accidental.48

Saltzman also states that “it was this fluidity, specifically the emblematic form of the stain that provided the touchstone for what became a significantly gendered discourse, one which set Frankenthaler’s work apart from that of her modernist male colleagues, past and present.”49 Saltzman’s statement suggests that the aspect of

Frankenthaler’s work that signified the “femininity” of the work to many critics was her soak-stain technique. This is problematic, though, because male artists also used this soak-stain technique. Does this mean, then, that works of Pollock, Kandinsky, Gorky,

Louis, and Noland inherently feminine due to the fact that they sometimes used the soak-stain technique, considering that the technique is associated with the female menstrual cycle? The historical answer to this question is no. The aforementioned male artists are never accused to being “feminine.” So, then, the soak-stain technique is only associated with femininity and the female body when a female artist is the one using the technique?

The apparent inconsistency between the soak stain technique and the gender of that artist using the technique was masked by a false binary created between male artists who used the soak stain technique and female artists who used the technique. In her essay, Saltzman includes a 1971 description of the work of Morris Louis by critic

Michael Fried, in which Fried falsely differentiates the soak stain works of Louis as

48 Ibid., 564-566. 49 Idib., 564.

40 completely different from those works by Helen Frankenthaler and failed to acknowledge their absolute interconnectedness, due to style. Saltzman summarizes

Fried’s observation saying: “Fried’s 1971 text on Louis thus displays in the metaphorics of its prose, the unacknowledged preoccupation with gender that pervaded discussions since its re-emergence in America after the war and, moreover, the unacknowledged preoccupation with controlling, through endless categorization, the potency of the feminine.”50

It was characteristic of the period in which Fried was writing to ignore or fail to mention the power and importance of the feminine, especially in works created by male artists. The macho heroism embodied in the myth of an artist like Jackson Pollock had no room for delicacy and femininity, as the powerful myth was essential to fulfill the aims and goals, politically, socially, and artistically, of the Greenbergian move towards abstraction as a space of pure freedom.

The preoccupation with gender difference in the New York School is important for

Saltzman because it marks a social change that was masked by the art of the abstract expressionist period which was insisted to be “autonomous, self-reflexive, and hermetic.”51 On the contrary, though, Saltzman argues that abstract expressionist paintings are actually symbols and embodiments of the social, political, and artistic tensions of post-war America, suggesting that:

“In their critical perception and attribution of masculinity to canvases painted by female artists, critics asserted the fundamental primacy of sexual difference, and did so at precisely a moment when gender

50 Ibid., 569. 51 Ibid., 571.

boundaries were seen as in danger of disappearing, both artistically and societally.”52

This observation is similar to an earlier observation by Griselda Pollock, in that the period of the abstract expressionist movement created a new opportunity for the female artist.

In Chapter One of this thesis Helen Frankenthaler’s works were situated within the historical and artistic context of the New York School. The post-war American context was also established as a time when a need for “insistent and intense”53 gendered rhetoric regarding female artists was necessary. This final chapter examined

Frankenthaler’s work and subject position from a feminist perspective and illuminated the importance of gender stratification and power struggles in the New York School. It also illuminated the fact that, many scholars, male and female, overlooked the works of

Helen Frankenthaler for decades. It was not until the 1990s and 2000s that critics and scholars were able to find value in working through Helen Frankenthaler’s complex position as a female artist working in the post-war New York School.

52 Ibid., 572. 53 Kristen Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pg 143.

Conclusion

Is Helen Frankenthaler simply a bridge between Pollock and what was possible?

After re-evaluating her career and artistic impact, the hope is that this thesis proves that she is an overlooked symbol for the female artist in a post-war American context negotiating her gender and role in the New York School and in American society in general.

Helen Frankenthaler is the quintessential example of a female artist working within the constraints of the dominant patriarchal ideology of the 1950s. She did not identify herself as a female artist but simply as an artist. Instead of emphasizing gender difference, Frankenthaler did not discuss her gender or the way in which it impacted or did not impact her work and career. Her unwillingness to acknowledge her subject position as one of the few females working as an abstract expressionist had lasting, made thoughtful feminist scholarship difficult.

Evaluation of Helen Frankenthaler’s subject position as a female in the New York

School results in a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of Helen

Frankenthaler and her work. Frankenthaler is not simply a bridge between Pollock and what was possible; she is an influential artist who impacted generations of abstract and figurative painters.

Works Cited

Agee, William C. "Frankenthaler's New Way of Making Art, The Wall Street Journal

(2008), 1-3, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122609409221009463.html.

(accessed April 14, 2009).

Andre, Emmerich. "Recollections: Greenberg and Frankenthaler." New Criterion

23, no. 4 (2004): 29-32.

Brown, Julia, "A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown," in After

Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959, (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998) 27.

Champa, Kermit S. "New Work of Helen Frankenthaler." ArtForum (Jan 1972),

55-59.

Elderfield, John. ""Breakthrough": On the 1950s Paintings of Helen Frankenthaler”

MoMa 2. 1 (1989), 8-11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4381078. (accessed March 5, 2009).

Elderfield, John. "Specific Incidents." Art In America (Feb 1982), 101-108.

Geldzahler, Henry, An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, Artforum (NY), 4, no.2

(Oct. 1965)

Greenberg, Clement, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” Art International (Zurich) 8,

nos. 5-6 (Summer 1964)

Kozloff, Max. “An Interview with Friedel Dzubas” ArtForum, (Sept. 1965), p 52.

Kramer, Hilton. "Gaga Over Guggenheim's Frankenthaler Exhibition The New

York Observer (2008), 1-2, http://www.observer.com/node/40117?page=all. (accessed April 15, 2009). Pg 1.

McGlinchey, Christopher. "Exploring Boundaries in Painting Technique” MoMa 3.

8 (2000), 6-9, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4420519. (accessed March 5,

2009).

Nochlin, Linda, "Why have there been no great women artists?," Art News

(special issue entitled "Women's Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History" (1971): 22-39.

Pollock, Griselda. "Killing Men and Dying Women: Gesture and Sexual

Difference." The Practice of Cultural Analysis (1999): 75 - 101.

Rose, Barbara. Frankenthaler. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1971.

Rosenberg, Harold, “The American Action Painters,” ArtNews (NY) 51,no. 8,

(Dec 1952) pp 22-23

Rowley,Alison. Helen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing Painting. I.B. Tauris,

2007.

Saltzman, Lisa "Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen

Frankenthaler's Painting." Reclaiming Female Agency (1992): 373-383.

Shattuck, Kathryn. "Kermit S. Champa, 64, Author And Distinguished Art

Historian." August 17, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/nyregion/kermit- s-champa-64-author-and-distinguished-art-historian.html?pagewanted=1 (accessed April 21, 2010).

Solomon, Nanette. “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission.” In EnGendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, edited by Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer- Davidow, 222–36. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Pg. 350.

Swinth, Kirsten, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of

Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 2000), 143.

Figures:

Figure 1. Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, Oil on canvas 7' 2 5/8" x 9' 9 1/4", National Gallery of Art, Washington

Figure 2. Morris Louis, Saf, 1959, magna on canvas, 98 1/2 x 141 in. (250.2 x 358.1 cm.) Private Collection.

Figure 3. Helen Frankenthaler, Flood, 1967. Synthetic polymer on canvas. 124 x 140 in. (315 x 355.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Figures 4 and 5. Taken by Martha Holmes for “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Life Magazine (New York) 27, no. 6 (August 8, 1949)

Figures 6 and 7. Photographs taken by Gordon Parks for: Portrait of American abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler in her studio, surrounded by her paintings. Life Magazine (New York) January 1957.