Helen Frankenthaler:Lost in the Woods.

"My work is not a matter of direct translations, but something is bound to creep into your head or heart" - Helen Frankenthaler.

Geisha (2003)

 

Sadly not, Helen. Not for me anyway. Your woodcuts look nice and all that but they didn't creep into either my head or my heart. Halfway home from visiting your Radical Beauty at Dulwich Picture Gallery last Friday afternoon I had pretty much forgotten all about them. I was more focused on what I was going to have for tea, and watch on television, that night.

 

I'm not sure that was your intent when you, no doubt passionately, created these works. Perhaps it's on me. Perhaps I'm not looking properly. Perhaps, after (strictly speaking, still in) the pandemic, I need work that is more political rather than just eye candy. Or perhaps it was the exhibition itself. Woodcuts are pretty niche and the Dulwich Picture Gallery charges quite a lot of money to visit what is actually a fairly small gallery so you can often come away feeling short changed.

East and Beyond (1973)

It's not as if I don't like Abstract Expressionism. I have written admiringly about it in the past. I have even written fondly about your work, not least when I visited, back in 2018, Victoria Miro's Surface Work exhibition to see your work hung alongside other female artists like Yayoi Kusama, Howardena Pindell, Liubov Popova, and Lee Krasner. Your work came out better than many others. 

I'm not sure why I'm writing this as if in letter form to Frankenthaler herself. She died in Connecticut, aged 83, nearly a decade back. Even if she was still alive, it seems unlikely she'd ever read my blog. I have no evidence whatsoever of a single artist reading any of my reviews so far - and I've been doing this shit for over a lustrum now.

That at least gives me the knowledge that I can pretty much say what I like and it won't come back to bite me on the bum (famous last words?). The exhibition's curators begin with a small contention. That Frankenthaler was a 'trailblazer' (to a degree she was, but she followed a path that had been created already by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Krasner, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko) and that she 'defied the limits of printmaking' (which, again, is debatable and probably needs someone far better qualified than me to verify).

Bolder claims, yet, are still made. Frankenthaler, we're informed, was guided by a mantra of 'NO RULES' when creating but her 'abstract exploration of shapes and voids' was not, as we're told in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, something 'that had not been seen before'. Perhaps they had not, or rarely had, in the medium of woodcut but for me to focus on the medium is to ignore the art itself.

Even Frankenthaler herself was initially sceptical of woodcuts, not really attempting them until about three decades into her career. Works like Radius (below) and Geisha (at the top of the piece) are, of course, pleasing to the eye. Maelstroms of colour that radiate and pulsate as we look at them. They are, essentially, pretty - and prettiness is a worthwhile target in art if not the only one available. To pass them off as somehow revolutionary, however, seems to me wide of the mark.

Radius (1993)

'Guzzying' was what she called her method. A way of breaking the unified colour that you would normally associate with woodcuts and move them over to the realm of Abstract Expressionism. Which in itself is quite a trick. Craftwise, she is a pioneer but that doesn't necessarily come across just by looking at the works and as an art fan and admirer I am attracted to the finished product and far less interested in process.

If 'process' had been my concern then this exhibition would have held a lot, well - a little, more for me. I was more interested to discover how Frankenthaler had taken inspiration from Renaissance prints she'd seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Japanese Gampi paper (something I'd never heard of before), and from the juice of the red berries on a mulberry tree outside the master printmaker Kenneth Tyler's workshop.

Essence Mulberry (1977)

They've been incorporated into the red you can see in 1977's Essence Mulberry which has a delightful, impressionistic, gauzy feel to it that reminds me both of sunrise and sunset. The Grove series of works from the early nineties are said to have something of Edvard Munch about them (which I can just about see - but I also thought of Paul Klee) and 1991's The Clearing is supposed to show Frankenthaler's fearlessness simply because she left a mistake in it. See if you can spot what it is.

Grove, Monoprint IV (1991)

Grove (1991)

The Clearing (1991)

It's a tiny triangle at the top middle left of the picture. How could anyone other than Frankenthaler possibly know that's a mistake let alone commend her for her fearlessness in keeping it in? The trouble when you abide by a mantra of 'no rules' is nobody can tell you when you've gone wrong. You can't have 'no rules' and then claim to be without fear because you're breaking them?

It doesn't work that way. Frankenthaler's works are aesthetically engaging, Cedar Hill reminds me a little of Philip Guston - caught almost halfway along the transition from abstraction back to figurative work and Weeping Crabapple (Frankenthaler's final woodcut made two years before her death) is spidery, nebulous, and intriguing, but these bold claims that are being made for her actually undermine that.

Cedar Hill (1983)

Weeping Crabapple (2009)

That's a shame as the longer the show went on, and it was a comparatively short one, the more engaged I became with her work. But the more I read about its lofty claims the more it irked me. The last room was devoted to Madame Butterfly. Frankenthaler's, apparently, "woodcut masterpiece" shares its title, of course, with Puccini's opera of love, birth, and death and consists of one hundred and two different colours (which is just showing off).

It looks good but if you can see love, birth, and death in it you're doing better than me. The washy pastel shades explode as if in slow motion to create a visual treat that perhaps evokes liminal spaces, hazy desert vistas, and landscapes. Even wood itself, unsurprisingly. But as for anything more than that. That is in the eye of the beholder and my eye was resolutely not for seeing it this time round.

Madame Butterfly (2000)

Madame Butterfly (2000)