Alexander Nemerov - Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York

Summoning Pearl Harbor

Soulmaker

Silent Dialogues

Wartime Kiss

Acting in the Night

Icons of Grief

The Body of Raphaelle Peale

Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America

At the start of the 1950s, Helen Frankenthaler was a young woman, just beginning as a painter. She was new to the New York art world, fresh from Bennington College and ready to make a name for herself among the male-dominated coterie of artists working in the new abstract expressionist mode. By the end of that decade, she had succeeded, setting the stage for the increasing recognition she would receive in a career that ultimately spanned more than half a century. A child of the Upper East Side, she was never an underdog. She had money, she had means, and she knew how to get ahead. But she needed skill, drive, savvy, charisma, andabove allan extraordinary gift to make her way. That gift consisted in taking what was happening around herinside her, tooand bringing it out in sudden, momentary pulsations of color and shape and line. The result was paintings as surprising and glorious as life itself, paintings that enshrine the living feeling of days like no one elses do.

The moments of a days existence are often a homely combination: a pigeon waddling on the sidewalk, an overflowing trash can, the bright white shirt and black glossy hair of a passerby. Focused on bigger things, larger goals, we learn to ignore such ephemeral experiences. But who is to say that fragile sensations do not carry their own weight, that they do not amount to a rich record of who we are, who, indeed, we will have been? Helen devoted herself to portraying these ambient and fleeting impressions. Without theorizing it, she relied on her own protean sense of life to convey the buzzing, flashing world around her in New York and the landscapes beyond: rivers and streams, sunlight on sand, a gentle curl of surf. Her blots and swaths of bright color suggest private feelings and experiences, the movements of one person in time.

True to Helen, this book takes on the formative decade in her life and career in the form of days. Each chapter centers on a specific date, starting in 1950 and ending in 1960, eleven chapters in all. The singularity of a day offers me an unscientific precisiona fluid glimpse into a momentlike Helens own. The date inscribed on the lower right corner of her most well-known painting, Mountains and Sea, 10/26/52, speaks to the importance of the diurnal round for this person so attentive to the flux and flow of daily existence. When she entered the studio she felt that all she was, every aspect of herself, down to some deep past, might find expression in a spontaneous and rigorous encounter with the canvas. Helens colors and stains were her material and method. Mine in portraying her is the one she invented.

Getting to that place has taken a long time. I first thought of writing about Helens paintings about twenty years ago. I loved her pictures and sensed a deep connection to them that I knew was personal. My father, Howard Nemerov, was one of her teachers at Benningtonhis first year there as an English professor, in 194849, was her senior year. I was born in Bennington some time later, in 1963long after she had left, but her presence must have remained, apart from her periodic visits to the place, because I believe I knew of her before I ever said a word. Her world and mine were so close that I was not surprised to discover, doing research for this book, that her first serious romantic partner, Clement Greenberg, attended a dinner party with my father in North Bennington the day after I was born. The fact that I call her Helen in this book is a token of the proximity I feel. Though I never met her, I could not keep calling her Frankenthaler page after pageit would seem false. I knew I would need to come near, to dare closeness, and that this proximity would take time. Her paintings moved me those twenty years ago, but I was not ready for them. The big canvases, the colors, the shapesthe feeling that it all came from the artists encounters with the world and with herselfshowed that I, in proportion, lacked the same palette, the same brush. I was afraid, unwilling and unable to acknowledge the depths her paintings stirred in me, the person her art patiently waited for me to become.

And so I delayed, and kept on delaying. For the last ten years of Helens lifeshe died in 2011I taught at Yale, just a forty-five-minute drive from her Connecticut home. I had become a little more knowledgeable than when I first imagined writing about her art, more mature and maybe a bit more confident. I probably could have made arrangements to meet her at any point in those years. But I did not. I knew that I still would have little to say, little to ask, and I suspected that even across a table from me she would have kept her distance. And so I never met Helen, which is a shame, since maybe she and I would have gotten along.