Bathroom Tales: Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice   

Expressions of
Feminity: Domestic
Space, Voice, Carnival
and the Body

Helen Frankenthaler's Resistant Stain

Constant Carnival
Culture

Helen Frankenthaler's Resistant Stain

This paper explores the connections between Helen Frankenthaler's process of staining the canvas, the feminine imagery that critical literature assumes of her work and her own perception of her work.

© 2001 by Nikki Renee Anderson

Helen Frankenthaler embraced Abstract Expressionism as a strong force within the second generation of artists in New York. She had a dialogue with the other artists of the second generation, which helped to inspire much of her work. As a cold war artist, Frankenthaler describes her work within a framework of formalism and authenticity. In an interview with Julia Brown she states, "But 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 with the wrist I have"(27). On the surface, that statement appears to be analogous with Jackson Pollock's authentic expression of the self, but the primary difference is her use of the word wrist. Pollock's work was masculine and his drips came from his bicep muscle. When Frankenthaler uses the feminine word wrist, she gives a small indication that she existed as an outsider with in 1950's Abstract Expressionism.

In her article, "Pollock's Nature, Frankenthaler's Culture", Ann M. Wagner recognizes that critics of the time had a deep discomfort with the idea that Frankenthaler's work could claim a gendered voice and still be successful art. Further, critics often characterized her work with feminine imagery and adjectives. Frankenthaler responded to critical perspective by both embracing and contradicting Abstract Expressionism. She is drawn to Pollock's work and she ultimately departs from it by rejecting the drip and creating the stain.

Wagner stated, "Ejaculation or menstruation? Neither formulation will do in every instance or maybe in any instance"(184). She was recognizing that gender and Frankenthaler's stain technique of painting visibly affected the language of critical reviews of her work. Parker Tyler struggled with the fact that her work does not have the masculine drips of Pollock's in Art News. "Her work excites without quite satisfying…she can make a paint-mass spurt like a dike and yet control it till it laps the canvas like a spent wave"(49).

Other critics battled with the seriousness of her work. Sir Herbert Read spoke about Las Mayas, "The saturated blotter effect of the thin paint on the unprimed canvas is very compelling. Yet I am somewhat uneasy about it. The accidental element seems to be carried too far" (Carmean, 24). There was significant ambivalence about her work and her ability to maintain her technique of painting. Even her first dealer, John Bernard Meyers at Tibor de Nagy questioned her ability to keep up her eccentric stain painting beyond her first show (Meyers). Frankenthaler's first stain painting, Mountains and Sea (1952), which is now remembered as influencing color field painting of the sixties, was not received enthusiastically in the 1950's. Many thought of the work as accidental and too much like a large paint rag (Carmean). Although she sold very little work during the fifties at her gallery, Tibor de Nagy, she made some of her most influential work during that time.

Frankenthaler embraced Abstract Expressionism as a part of the second generation in which she created a dialogue with and departure from Pollock's painting. She constantly reasserted her interest in making art that is good, not gendered. In her interview with Brown she acknowledged that she might have been resented at the time for her gender or youth but still her only concern was to make strong work, not work that characterized her as a woman. This separation she made from content was important because she was trying to maintain a façade of authenticity which was essential to the Abstract Expressionist movement. The critics responded to this façade and noticed it; "none of the younger artists had a more immediate feeling for the painting itself to make this fervor authentic"(Tyler, 49).

In her exposure to the New York school in the 1950's, she was initially highly influenced by Willem de Kooning. She eventually leaned toward Pollock because she felt that she could depart from his work into her own. This was unusual for the second generation because many painted similarly to de Kooning (Cross). Frankenthaler described that Pollock opened the way for her to make her own mark. She was not interested in Pollock's drips but instead in his mode of working on the floor and without a conventional brush. When commenting on her departure from drip to stain, Frankenthaler maintains her Abstract Expressionist authenticity, "I had no plan, I just worked. The point was to get down the urgent message I felt somehowready to express…I needed something more liquid, watery, thinner"(Brown, 39).

The stain was significant to Frankenthaler's work because it became her mode of resistance and it allowed her to function within Abstract Expressionism as an outsider. Many women of the 1950's had returned to the role of homemaker after the war and men became 'organization men' who followed the rules of their corporations. People began to search for a sense of individuality and they found it within the arts. Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists represented and embodied the 'frontiersmen.' Their work gave viewers a sense of freedom and authentic expression of the masculine self, which was eagerly acquired within the cold war economy. As a woman, Frankenthaler had to find a way to exist within an art world that only valued this male expression. She existed as an outsider within Abstract Expressionism by creating her stain paintings.

Pollock's method of working on top of the canvas on the floor has many different connotations. Pollock's canvas has been interpreted as a feminine, pure, white and virginal space for him to express his masculinity. Frankenthaler used Pollock's mode of working on the floor but her stains were dramatically different than his drips. By bleeding the paint onto the canvas, she is reclaiming it as an extension of her body. The feminine canvas began to speak its own language of staining rather than being a showcase surface for the drip. In certain cases, she even placed her handprint on the canvas such as in Eden (1956). Her handprint is different than Pollock's because it is stained into the surface of the canvas. It becomes the hand of the feminine canvas and an extension of Frankenthaler's body. Pollock's hand sits on the surface of the canvas and is a separate figure from the canvas. Suddenly the stain was one with the canvas, "My paint, because of the turpentine mixed with the pigment, soaked into the woof and weave of the surface of the canvas and became one with it"(Brown, 39). By enacting the feminine canvas's voice, Frankenthaler subverted Pollock's power and gave her own voice a space to exist within Abstract Expressionism.

Her voice of the stain began to have content that was gendered, but in upholding her position as an Abstract Expressionist, Frankenthaler always claimed that any theme in her painting came from formalist issues. In describing Mother Goose Melody (1959), she explains the content as a result of formal issues within the painting. However, she also explains that the painting references her and her two sisters with a stork figure. Her voice of the stain and the feminine canvas become a place to express content of nursery rhymes and family. Again in describing Swan Lake I (1961), she reemphasizes finding the content in her work rather than planning it. She compares finding the swans in her paintings to playing a game as a child where she would search for hidden images within a picture. The stain and the canvas become a way for her gendered voice to come out, 'unconsciously.' This idea was parallel with the Abstract Expressionist movement but she was allowing "authentic expression" of the self to be feminine. She then went on to support this unconscious voice by creating Swan Lake II (1961). In this painting she intentionally sketched out the image of the swan before beginning the painting. Sometimes she made her intention more overt such as with Nude (1958). Her interpretation of the nude female body has a square head with a few stained dots to represent breasts and nipples (Carmean). This is her 'study' of the body but it has the resonance of a critical perspective on art history's portrayal of women. Gendered content within her work came out as her mode of staining created a new kind of voice within Abstract Expressionism.

Although Frankenthaler made important breakthroughs with her work in the 1950's, very little of it sold. That included Mountains and Sea, which was priced at one hundred dollars. She did, however, have a growing group of fans by the end of the 1950's (Meyers).

Her work of that time went on to influence many of the color field painters of the 1960's. The masculine language of the drip was lost and the stain began to have a powerful legacy. The feminine voice of the canvas was resonant. Mountains and Sea influenced in particular Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. After it was completed, Clement Greenburg saw the work and then told Louis and Noland about its power. The legend recounts that the two artists made a special trip from Washington D.C. to see the work and they were inspired to continue in its method of staining (Carmean). Recognition of this later provoked a change in judgment of her work. This makes clear that the language of the drip did not extend beyond Pollock's masculinity. Louis's response to Pollock, "We were interested in Pollock but could gain no lead from him. He was too personal"(Wagner, 186). It was important that the feminine canvas had its own voice and its own power. It was not an extension of Louis's and Noland's bodies in the way it was of Frankenthaler’s body. They could begin to have a dialogue with the materials of paint and canvas in a new way in which the materials had a voice too. Pollock's drips only spoke of his own voice, not that of other artists or of the materials.

In his account of Frankenthaler's first show at Tibor de Nagy, John Myers admired the originality of Frankenthaler's stain but questioned the work's abiltiy to sustain itself. It is clear that his skepticism was unfounded because her techniques had great legacy. Frankenthaler not only found a space in Abstract Expressionism as an outsider; she also constructed a new character of voice within it. She framed herself as parallel with Abstract Expressionist, which helped her to maintain her role within it. However, her painting vocalized her resistance as well as strengthened her role and position within the art world.

Works Cited

Brown, Julia, "A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown," in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998.

Carmen, E.A., Helen Frankenthaler: A Painting Retrospective. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1989.

Cross, Susan, "The Emergence of a Painter," in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998.

Myers, John Bernard, Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World. Random House, 1983.Tyler, Parker. "Helen Frankenthaler." Art News. Feb 1956. Vol 54. 49.

Wagner, Ann M. "Pollock's Nature, Frankenthaler's Culture." Jackson Pollock: New Approaches. New York: MOMA, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1999.