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Remembering Helen Frankenthaler
Hearing today that Helen Frankenthaler has passed took me back to 1969, and Baltimore where I met her when I was twenty. It changed my life. I had seen and come to love her work that seemed to breathe itself into being. There was a joy and a spring (both the season and the urge to dance) to it that was and is unique. Directly in her work I perceived what is stated in the I Ching : that something serious can be said in a laughing manner.
Helen’s color sense and development of it seemed amazing to me. I asked her, “How do you choose your color?” And she replied, “The way you choose a word in a poem.” I remember Grace Hartigan quoted our exchange back to her students.
I was fortunate that Helen liked and encouraged my work. She brought Clement Greenberg to see it and brought a bottle of whiskey to my loft for him. She said, “This is like Napoleon coming over!” When you admire someone and they in turn like your work, there is no greater compliment possible. It is easy today for me to give back to other painters, poets, and other artists because of Helen's generosity.
I had known artists since I was a small child. They were always part of the milieu around my parents. As an adolescent there were four important women teachers who all gave enormously to me. But it was Helen who made me realize for sure that I had gone the distance.
Helen was incredibly warm and enthusiastic and introduced me to all her circle. Helen and I would go to exhibitions in galleries and museums. She had a great and inquisitive eye, and I rarely have met anyone as articulate and passionate about painting and art and life.
Tonight I burnt incense and remembered Hilda Morley on Charles Olson's death:
The night I heard that you'd died & I
just beginning to see you whole
I lit a candle
without knowing why
I burned the sandalwood
Wong May had given me
The sticks curled
downward crumpling powdered away
sharpening
the air
And remembering being in a cab with Helen and getting left off on Park Ave. and saying to her "I look forward to the work you will do in your eighties!" Helen remarked quickly "I'm more worried about your safety in this traffic!"
After meeting Helen I wrote a paper on her and sent her the section on Hurricane Flag. She told a mutual friend that (at the time) it was the best piece of writing on her work.
—John Blee, December 27, 2011
Hurricane Flag
As something weathers it is usually prized for some sort of mold or patina, or perhaps wrinkles or duskiness. With Frankenthaler, weathering can only involve a returning to the source. This results in a paradoxical freshness, with her almost a lightness: a new grace, not merely a revised grace. She speaks of sidestepping when she comes to a crisis in the direction of her art. Not merely that her painting comes from something or from things, but that her source comes from within herself and that it continues, determines the way that she is able to move. “Hurricane Flag” stands apart from the work she did in the summer of 1969 (Stride, Commune, Blessing of the Fleet, Chatham Light, Mirror) because she works from something as much as towards anything. It is less spatial than the rest in that it is more of an object, and less about space or color or even less of a confrontation (in a formal sense) than the others. It appears more spontaneously arrived upon, in both a particular and a total reading of the picture and its image, than the other pictures. It is perhaps more of an enigma relating to Rilke’s dictum, “the artist loves the enigma.” That the picture is more of a mystery than the others finally makes it more than the other paintings.
The image of the picture is not as complex as the other pictures of the summer, yet what it includes, what it declares in itself is more. It is perhaps less self-conscious and more alert to itself. That such a large, even grandiose painting can be anything but self-conscious is incredible. In order for a painter to be unself-conscious, a painter can be naïve (and how Motherwell is right in saying that the talented can never be naïve—that it becomes a mannerism), or through experience, through weathering, his very process becomes a part of himself. It is forgotten in order to be used more sharply, more decisively. This is related to the Rilke Sonnet to Orpheus:
O not till
the time when flight
no longer
will mount for its own sake
into the sky
stillnesses,
sufficient
unto itself,
that in luminous
profilings,
as the tool
that succeeded,
it may platy
the winds’ favorite,
surely
curving and slim, --
not till a pure whither
outweighs
boyish pride
wf growing
machines,
will, headlong and
winning,
one who has
neared the distances
be his lone
flight’s attaining.
Again, this unself-consciousness is allied with the medium. The poured acrylic demands its own gravity more than almost any other kind. Its particular quality demands unself-consciousness in order to succeed.
That Hurricane Flag transcends any meaning that is merely associative is because it is declarative. It is neither episodic nor descriptive. It demands to stand on its own as a voice. That it declares itself so starkly speaks of the condition of our times. That it can (in itself) afford not to be brutal, speaks of a temperament that can afford simply to be.
—John Blee, 1969