Episode 62: Helen Frankenthaler’s Madame Butterfly (2000)

VOICE 1: Okay. What am I looking at? I'm looking at splotches.

White and pink and purple at the bottom. And it's delicate. It's an abstract piece. It is not like a Jackson Pollock. It's not aggressive like a Jackson Pollock, but it's light and it's ethereal, if that's a word I can use here. But it's feminine and it's not imposing.

VOICE 2: One of the things that immediately jumps out to me is the fact that the piece appears to be a triptych with a center and two wings, which obviously kind of parallels that of a butterfly. At the same time, the wings are significantly more rough woodgrain texture is much more visible. Obviously there are these kind of splashes of vibrant reds and blues. This wood grain that is almost looks like the raw material of a...of a plywood board. To me, it kind of resembles the camouflage wings, the camouflage gossamer of moths.

The colors remind me of a landscape, obviously an abstracted, blurry landscape, but the pinks of a sunrise or sunset and the greenish tone of hills on the horizon and a blue shoreline. There's something serene about it, something complex or layered.

VOICE 1: This is a piece. I think you can get a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and spend some time with.

Time to overshare.  So…I was a kid who got a lot of nose bleeds.  Whether it was due to sleeping near a radiator or dry air or curious fingers, I mean, look, we don’t need to solve any mysteries here, but the point is, I got used to the drill of running for a kleenex, holding my head forward, definitely not backward, ew, and waiting, gently test sniffing, waiting, dabbing.  And dabbing.  As I waited for my nose to dry back up, I couldn’t help but enjoy the process of dabbing that paper towel, watching that bright red stain quietly spread through its grains until it reached its natural, subtle stop.  You can see that process better with paper towels than with tissues – I’m sure, it won’t surprise you that the kind of kid who observed things like that.  And you can really see it if you take it to the sink, stopping the drain, turning the spigot, and watching a little drop of blood hit the water and ripple out like paint.  As I got older, and my nose got cleaner, so to speak, there were other functions and fluids that took its place, mascara and menstrual blood and soap bubbles circling the drain, other “messy necessary liquids of life” in the words of art critic and friend of the pod Adam Gopnik.  These liquids pooled and stained and swirled and made me see my body as perpetually capable of producing these art-making materials that could leave an impression on the world.  It’s gross, sure, and not something I’d normally talk about outside my closed bathroom door, but maybe also kind of beautiful?

Beautiful, as the artist Helen Frankenthaler said in an interview in 1990, is a tricky word, especially in art.  Not only can we not pin down what it actually means, we can’t decide whether or not it’s even good, whether it’s a worthy thing for art to aspire to be.  “Beautiful” is a word that has been applied to Frankenthaler’s work in particular, and for better and worse.  In the 1950s, it was hard enough to be a female abstract expressionist, who was both a friend and protégé of Jackson Pollock, like she was, steering clear of his hurling material spatter and swinging metaphorical genitals.  But to then take these dynamic, masculine Abstract Expressionist ideas of form, fling, energy, and materiality, and make them feminine, soft, beautiful?  It’s like you’re asking to be diminished, especially by your fellow female painters, who, it should be said, were crueler to her work than any man was.  The painter Grace Hartigan sneered that Frankenthaler, notably a member of the upper crust, created paintings that look like they were created “between cocktails and dinner.”  Joan Mitchell dismissed Frankenthaler as a “Kotex painter,” one of the meanest things you could say to a woman artist trying to keep pace with the big boys of the movement.  It’s bad enough to reduce a woman to her menstrual cycles, but to liken her work to menstrual stains is fucking savage.  There’s an extra special place in hell for women artists who don’t support each other, is all I’m saying.

But okay, if you’re comparing Pollock to Frankenthaler, spatter to stain, then yes, Frankenthaler is going to seem like something passive and residual, something left behind.  But Frankenthaler wasn’t trying to keep pace with Pollock, or Hartigan and Mitchell, for that matter.  Her stains weren’t left-behind.  They were a medium all their own: gentle, limitless, intimate, light as air.  They evoked runny spills, smudgy traces of life lived, ethereal clouds in the sky, hazy, indistinct horizons.  And they amount to something that is, tricky as the word can be, transcendentally and upliftingly beautiful, as the curator notes in reference to this woodcut, Madame Butterfly, from 2000, the end of Frankenthaler’s career, and, almost, her life.

And it’s hard to talk about one without the other, that is, her career, and her life, because she was one of those artists who started painting really young and then lived a really long time, so we get to see how her work evolved throughout her life.  She was born in New York on December 12, 1928 – as it happens, 55 years to the day before I did – and died two weeks after her 83rd birthday in 2011.  She painted the painting that made her famous in 1952, when she was 23.  That’s the kind of age where fame basically sets the course of the rest of your life.  And there’s no question that she was well-positioned for success, growing up on the upper east side of Manhattan, born into a life of cultural and intellectual privilege, educated at the finest schools, wearer of the finest pearls.  But she was encouraged to pursue the life of the mind, and the life of the imagination, which was unique for a woman in that moment.  So when she graduated from college and entered the New York art scene, in her words, “a saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington,” and then was introduced to a parade of significant with a capital S mid-century critics and artists – Hans Hoffman, Clement Greenburg, whom she dated, Robert Motherwell, whom she married, and then of course Pollock – she was extraordinarily well-positioned to both absorb their influence and use it to create something new.  She was confident, she was educated, she was invited to take a seat at the table.  It turns out, when you’re both privileged and talented, you talk and the art world listens.

It was her relationship with Pollock, though, that initially set her on course – a woman who, in her younger days, would drip drops of nail polish into the basin of her own sink to watch the colors ripple and spread – get it, girl – found herself in the studio of a man who poured entire paint cans onto a canvas on the floor.  It’s not surprising that Pollock, in her words, “captured my eye and my whole psychic metabolism at a crucial moment in my life.”  And it was particularly that unique Pollock method of laying the canvas on the floor and approaching it from all sides, of using his own body and movements as though he himself were the bristles of a paintbrush, making contact with the rough, unprimed canvas, all of which we discussed in episode 12, that made an impression on her, and which she then took to her create her own unique style.  In the early 1950s, in her early 20s, through a combination of what she describes as “impatience, laziness, and innovation,” Frankenthaler was struck with the idea to thin her paints with turpentine and then, like Pollock, pour them from coffee cans onto a large canvas on the floor and see how they interacted with each other – how they ran together and coalesced as they spread and soaked fully into the grains of the unprimed canvas, without gravity dictating their direction, or borders limiting her scope.  The fact of the canvas being on the ground, in fact very ground itself, Frankenthaler writes, was part of the medium.  And this novel act of staining, rather than stroking, turned thick, ponderous oils into luminous watercolors.  It revealed the drawn pencil marks underneath that then became a part of the painting.  It changed the medium, the subject of abstraction, the conversation.

And you see this in that painting that made her famous, “Mountains and Sea” from 1952.  Frankenthaler had just returned from a trip to Cape Bretton, Nova Scotia, a spot known for its scenic vistas, where mountains eternally meet sea.  This is an abstract painting that evokes that landscape, the green of a rocky shoreline, the blue splashes of the hammering ocean waves.  It was also the first time she had tried out this floor technique, this soak stain technique – as she wrote, the real talent lay in deciding “where to leave it, where to fill it, where to say, this doesn’t need another line or another pail of color.”  And the results were light and airy, and, in her words, casual, accidental, incomplete, capturing the impermanence of the landscape and the light, 70 years after Monet, except now using the medium itself, the diaphanous paint, the gentle faded stain, as the language to communicate it.  Like with light and water, the stain is both the thing that is there and not there, both present and what remains.

And let’s look at the importance of the stain itself, that is, the paint.  The art critic Clement Greenberg strongly believed that the best part of modern painting, now that cinema and photography had taken on the heavy lifting of replicating the world realistically, was its ability to just be paint.  Yet paint itself, and moreover, color, its tones and values, its interrelationships and moods, could then play into a larger emotional landscape.  Color was key for Frankenthaler – she describes her process as “drawing with color, not line” – and for all the pastel subtlety of “Mountains and Sea,” she also experimented with vibrant colors that practically danced off the canvas, with density and boldness, with volume and transparency, especially as she got older.  And yet, there was always still a larger emotional depth to those colors; Greenberg described Frankenthaler’s art as always on searching for the “Innerlichkeit” or inwardness, of the state of the world around her, which in the postwar American 1950s, especially for a Jewish artist like Frankenthaler, would never have been simple, or conclusive.  And this kind of exploration calls to mind Mark Rothko from episode 24, a fellow color field Abstract Expressionist, a fellow prober of deep feeling whose paint dissolves elegantly from one color to the next.  The difference, it would seem, is just that Frankenthaler seems…happier.  There’s helium in her balloons.  There’s a greater sense of joy in discovery, in experimentation, in that paint itself; the Guardian critic Jonathan Jones gloriously wrote that a late Frankenthaler is like a Rothko dancing to jazz. 

So we’ve got a Frankenthaler who looks for an emotional inner life but also just loves the surface paint.  We’ve got a gentler, subtler Abstract Expressionist whose work dances to jazz.  We have the curator Judith Goldman who describes Frankenthaler’s work as “abstract and realistic, free and controlled, emphatically flat and capable of deep space.”  Clearly we’re dealing with artists, and curators for that matter, who have no problem contradicting themselves.  And that’s just kind of the occupational hazard of Abstract art at all.  It also revels in contradiction, or maybe juxtaposition, existing at a curious intersection between simplicity and complexity, between what is easily legible and what feels intentionally inaccessible.  Big fat splotches of paint that go over straight your head.  Or, when done well, make you cry.  And Frankenthaler thrives in the space – “most things are about ambiguity,” she famously said.  And it’s why you have, in her work, joy and grief and surface paint.  You have an upper crust Bennington graduate playing with the runny, stained elements of life, like lipstick traces left on a Kleenex, as our pal Adam Gopnik says.  You have paintings that, in the words of Frankenthaler’s nephew, “provide a richer, slower sense of how you should read a painting,” that should also feel like it was painted, in her own words, “all at once,” like the painting has magically hit both the canvas and your eye in its wonderful, complete totality.  And it’s why you have a beautiful painting that shouldn’t be reduced to its beauty – after all, she says, you can’t prove beauty, and you certainly don’t want your work dismissed as merely beautiful, and yet the painting only succeeds if it is, in fact, beautiful.

And this brings us to her later work, the transcendentally and upliftingly beautiful painting that we’re focusing on today.  It’s actually a series of woodcuts, not technically paintings, but like with most of Frankenthaler’s work, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the media used, ink, paint, drawings, it’s all a smeary blur that’s absolutely beautiful to behold, but, of course, let’s take that as a given.  From a technical perspective, it’s directly referencing Japanese woodcut technique of ukiyo-e printing, which we explored in episode 42, the ethereal “floating world.”  It’s also a Japanese narrative, referencing the tragic Puccini opera that centers on a Japanese heroine.  The piece is constructed from two different paper types, 46 woodblocks, and 102 customized colors, and measures at over six-and-a-half feet.  And yet, it’s not what you would ever imagine a woodcut to look like.  We’re used to those blocks being, well, blocky.  There’s a blunt, graphic linearity to traditional woodblock printing, one where you can imagine the building up of an image, block by block, but here, it’s light as gossamer, velvety, delicate, almost as though it goes from in-focus to out-of-focus in a single sweep, and capturing her all-at-once sensibility through a medium that never does that.  And this untraditional aesthetic came from untraditional tools; in a process she wonderfully referred to as “guzzying,” she would distress the surface of her woodblock with cheese graters and dental instruments, so that they looked as grainy and absorbent as the unprimed canvases of her earlier paintings.  Speed was essential in the process, as every layer had to be wet to absorb and run with every subsequent layer.  She would then cut up different prints and paste them together with others, creating, amazingly, what is essentially collage of pure, unmitigated, and it must be said, beautiful flow.

So how to wrap this all up? I will say this.  Despite being birthday buddies, Helen Frankenthaler and I are pretty different.  The sense that I get from watching interview after interview on YouTube is that she is decidedly not an oversharer – she talks about her work in a slow, measured, humorless way that speaks to a career spent defending her place in the movement between the big boys and the bitches (although, to her credit, Grace Hartigan later apologized for the between cocktails and dinner burn).  What I’m saying is that Frankenthaler is not someone who would flippantly talk about the things that belong behind the bathroom door in the classic six of her childhood.  But she knew where to find beauty.  And she knew it could be behind that door.  It could be anywhere.  And accessing it required a kind of freedom in creativity that feels totally unlike her upbringing, her marriages, her sex and gender in the middle of the 20th century.  She knew how to push against the grain, both in her life and in her unprimed canvas, to contradict herself in the pursuit of something, again, in her words, “naturally creatively free, heart, head, and wrists.  To be in control enough not to be in control at all.”  To find the “beautiful working order” to an artwork, in nature, in a drop of blood, or of nail polish, expanding outwards, subtly staining the water, organically going where it wants, gentle, limitless, intimate, light as air.  All at once.  All beautiful.