by James Glisson
There are a couple of reasons to read biographies. They share revelations gleaned from patient research in archives or unearth letters that bear out the subject’s thinking. Alternatively, a biographer might track down people who had not been previously interviewed – the childhood friend or the boyfriend or girlfriend from college. These can be scandalous and cutting or sad, revealing hidden traumas. Then, there are biographies built around dazzling reinterpretations of the novels, letters, or films by the subject. A gifted close reader can discover formerly hidden patterns and new intersections between life and art.
There’s a third pleasure to take away from a biography. It is less about new facts or reinterpretations, and more about the mood. It’s the Bildungsroman of the heroine in the current of a life unfolding, of opportunities and setbacks; there’s a what’s-around-the-corner excitement. Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979) has this quality, as does Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” (1967). Both pieces of writing are autobiographical yet also quasi-fiction or even speculative non-fiction.
While the book under review, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, is inflected with citations, quotes and the apparatus expected of a scholar like Alexander Nemerov, a professor at Stanford University, it is also imbued with mood and tone, like Hardwick or Didion. Nemerov’s narrative turns on Frankenthaler’s paintings, her compulsion to make them, and her ambition, but it is also about all that could have derailed her painting. An instructive comparison is with Mary Gabriel’s magisterial Ninth Street Women (2018), which covers much of the same ground, but weaves Frankenthaler’s early years in with that of other pathbreaking women in her circle, and, while compulsively readable, does not have the same expectant mood.
There is a sediment of facts that cling to most introductions to Frankenthaler. She came from a wealthy German-Jewish family and grew up in an Upper East Side apartment with servants. Her father Alfred Frankenthaler was a respected and successful attorney. He later sat as a New York state appeals court judge, where he dealt with mortgages during the Great Depression. Her parents doted on her and encouraged art making. She attended the city’s elite private schools, Horace Mann, Brearley and finally Dalton, where Rufino Tamayo taught her painting. In 1949, she graduated from Bennington College, then a center of intellectual ferment, bustling with German intellectuals who had fled the Nazis. Not long after arriving in the city, she dated the career-making (or breaking) critic Clement Greenberg, who was nearly twenty years her senior.
There is one more fact that is always listed. On Oct. 26, 1952, in a single three-hour session, Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea, which moved New York School abstraction past the innovations of Jackson Pollock’s drips. Frankethaler’s technique of pouring turpentine thinned paint onto raw canvas sparked what became the Washington Color School that included Jules Olitski and Morris Louis. A woman lead, and the boys followed behind.
To understand what makes Nemerov’s lapidary approach, let’s walk through the chapter “Mountains and Sea,” the facts of that afternoon, their emotional tenor, and his speculation about her intellectual framework. His treatment is novelistic and has all the lightness of touch of Frankenthaler’s abstractions. We learn that Frankethaler has just moved into a new studio one block from her apartment at London Terrace Gardens on 23rd between 9th and 10th avenues. We learn her studio mate, Friedel Dzubas, is there too.
Frankenthaler thins paint with turpentine and pours for about three hours, channeling the memories of the rocky Nova Scotia coast from her summer vacation with Greenberg and the watercolors she made there. After she stopped, she Dzubas over. They knew the painting was a breakthrough; and Greenberg, who saw painting soon thereafter, did too.
This triumphant studio session, an interlude of determination and focus, is read against Frankenthaler’s professional despair, political setbacks, and emotional turmoil. She was half-heartedly looking for a full-time job, and, like many New York School artists, she supported Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election. Stevenson was defeated by Eisenhower about a week after she paints Mountains and Sea. While she was not out and out political, she did not like Nixon, Eisenhower’s running mate.
While Frankenthaler did not wish to be a mother, she did long for direction, sometimes feeling listless. Her two sisters had growing families. A month before Mountains and Sea, she broke down in tears when seeing off a friend, Sonia Rudikoff and her family, as they boarded a ship to England. “I felt I that my own life had stopped,” Frankenthaler wrote, “as I stood on the deck and posed for the pictures and saw all the people going someplace.”
There is more to the story than the heroine at a low point overcoming doubt. Nemerov also considers Frankenthaler’s time at Bennington where she learned from stellar faculty such as poet Howard Nemerov (Alexander Nemerov’s father) and the painter Paul Feeley. European intellectuals fleeing the Nazis also taught there. Peter Drucker, one of the fathers of the MBA, and Eric Fromm, the psychoanalyst and public intellectual, taught there in the 1940s. Frankenthaler studied sociology under Fromm, and his ideas around freedom within the conformity imposed by society. Nemerov quotes from Fromm’s Escape from Freedom:
Whether it be the fresh and spontaneous perception of a landscape or the drawing of some truth as the result of our thinking, or a sensuous pleasure that is not stereotype, or the welling up love for another person—in these moments we all know what the spontaneous act is and may some vision of what human life could be if these experiences were not such rare and uncultivated occurrences. (14–15)
One might make the mistake of thinking Fromm was describing a Frankenthaler painting with its spontaneity and its conversion spills and accidents into marks on the canvas. Not being intellectual, not being caught in rationality or ideology could also be a “theory” of painting. Mountains and Sea is a moment that is lifted above stereotype and mundane into a limited version of freedom, one passing and as evanescent as the these the clouds of pigment on her canvases.
Indeed, Frankenthaler rejected theorizing, “No painting is good ‘intellectually’” (75); and when asked by a reporter about the meaning of her work, she replied curtly, “You want clues? There are no clues.” Nonetheless, she had a strong idea of the effect the painting should have. She often praised a successful work of art by saying it gave her a “charge.” In evaluating her paintings, she discarded anything that felt labored. It should give the impression of happening all at once.
For all that she closed off from the intellectual, she did acknowledge that her paintings abounded in feeling – though not personal or biographic. These are not diaristic jottings of her day. Nemerov is particularly convincing when he claims the 1950s abstractions are private and public; probings and emanations of emotions; but not the emotional life of the artist herself.
If this seems like double-talk, it is similar to an actor whose inner person is not the same as her performance, even if from outside they appear to be the same. Frankenthaler said that the painting Blue Territory (1955) contained “inner amorphous worlds or depths exploding on the surface and in perspective.” It is an undersea vent releasing pressure from deep within the earth, a conduit for emotion to flow through.
While this reviewer has focused on the paintings, the momentum of this book comes from the personal bramble that the artist cut through in her twenties. There was her mother’s suicide after her Parkinson’s disease became unbearable, and Frankenthaler’s decision to keep herself at remove from the ensuing family drama that forever stained her relationship with her sisters. There was the fractious five-year long relationship with Clement Greenberg, and his stalker behavior after she ended things, which culminated with him slapping her at a party and causing her to break down in tears. (She continued to be friendly with Greenberg until his death.) Her marriage to the artist Robert Motherwell, which lasted from 1958 to 1971, and began as a union of determined artists shaping their lives around the studio. She took on the awkward role of stepmother to Motherwell’s daughters from a previous marriage.
What comes out from these episodes is how much the stuff of life pulls artists away from the steely focus required to make something original and to sustain a career, but Frankenthaler was never deflected for long.
