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The Gendering of Helen Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea

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The Gendering of Helen Frankenthaler's 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. ii 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 1 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. 2 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
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