Word: colorizers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sent Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland round to see Mountains and Sea in Frankenthaler's studio, they were astonished. "It was as if Morris had been waiting all his life for this information," Noland would say later. What they saw was a way to convey the weightless bloom of color without any apparent thickness of paint: light without texture. (Maybe they could have seen it earlier by looking at Turner's watercolors, but never mind: American taste ran to watercolors the size of Guernica.) Though practically no one now buys the '60s' doctrinaire readings of color-field painting -- the arguments...
...that appears in Eden, 1956, to the shamelessly romantic sky space that hangs behind the lavender blobs of pigment in Sacrifice Decision, 1981, one sees traces of the surrealist ideas that had formed Pollock -- an openness to the kind of unsought private image that was generally barred from color-field painting. Frankenthaler disliked programs and was not a self-conscious avant-gardist...
...Frankenthaler never worked in series; each picture was, to some degree, a new start. The pleasure was in the freshness. What is the central shape so comfily enclosed within the framing edges of Buddha's Court, 1964? A fat little figure, but vaguely so; the Rothko-like bars of color could indicate someone squatting in the lotus position. Yet it cannot have started from a figure: it is the sensation of calm presence that comes off the blues, in their association with tan and brown edges, that generates the "subject" of the painting. You still feel that Frankenthaler found something...
This openness comes in part from what the catalog of her last big New York museum show -- at the Whitney, 20 years ago -- rather stiffly called the "landscape paradigm." Over the years, it has been landscape (its closeup detail and far extension, its variety of light and color) to which Frankenthaler's images were kin -- if not in descriptive convention, then certainly in general feeling. You know before you read the label that it is the sea, and not an abstract blue surface, that spreads out in Ocean Drive West...
...complicated artist, then, and an original one, but not without her limitations either. Frankenthaler's forte has always been controlling space with color, vigilantly monitoring the exact recession of a blue or the jump of a yellow, the imbricated weight of a dark area against the open glare of unpainted canvas. Color is the chief subject of her pictorial intelligence, her main vehicle of feeling. But every patch of color must have a bounding edge, and Frankenthaler's edges tend to wobble; they are overcomplicated; in some paintings, like Flood, 1967, they just go limp. She is undistinguished...