H
elen Frankenthaler’s Somnambulist is a testament to her vibrant, innovative and charismatic approach to painting in the 1980s. Still on the high of a period of leading success in the mid- to late-1970s, Frankenthaler enhanced her practice with even further complexity and dynamism; she infused lumps of pigment within the spills of saturated color, demonstrating a more painterly and saturated approach to applying pigment to the canvas. This new approach to painting was, in many ways, a mélange of her varied methods that had come before.
“In 1982 she impulsively, even frantically, explores many new [options] that, while derived and developed from earlier ones, begin a more drastic overhauling of the possibilities of her art than before.”
As a more mature artist, Frankenthaler makes space for experimentation and liberates her approach to the canvas, even further entrenching her oeuvre in the values that guide her practice. Executed in 1989, Somnambulist is an exceptional example from this experimentally fecund moment in Frankenthaler’s career as an artist; one cannot help but be swept away in its swirling velocity—it has current.
While in high school at the Dalton School, Frankenthaler received her earliest instruction in art from Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, who taught her to value craftsmanship, color, and material. Frankenthaler learned about color theory and working on a large scale from Tamayo. Tamayo was known for his mastery of color which as she described, “He [ Rufino Tamayo, Mexican painter] showed me how to use my first paint box [and gesturing toward an old wooden palette displayed like a prize on the wall] That's my original palette!“ The present work is titled as one of Rufino Tamayo’s paintings. Painted in 1954, the subject is a sleepwalking man depicted in an exaggerated perspective. In the present work, Frankenthaler and Tamayo are alluding to the themes of unconscious condition sleepwalking can be related to the unknown, to a confused and imbalance state.
“By the time I got to Bennington (March, 1946), I was quite involved in painting because of Tamayo. I had stayed in New York a term after high school—I was sixteen—I stayed in New York to paint with Tamayo. He taught me how to paint—Tamayos. He taught me how to stretch a canvas, mix mediums. I still have my pictures in his colors, blues, ochres, watermelon reds. I didn’t know he derived from Picasso. He thought I was a good student—and I made such good Tamayos!”
In many ways, Frankenthaler’s practice in the 1980s echoes her earliest Color Field works, her signature form of abstractions which marked a departure from the mainstream mythic narrative and style of Abstract Expressionism. While her paintings of the 1970s aimed to reflect the metaphysical and the emotional, her works in the 1980s return some attention to the interplay of formal elements within the painting, bringing focus to the surface of the canvas itself. Passages of muted blue, white, and red rush vertically across the canvas, evidence of Frankenthaler’s process of pouring paint made abundantly clear. Dancing lines of pigment run parallel, echoing the saturated expanses of paint. From 1983 onwards, her paintings moved away from her more celebrated style to a new technique inspired by her visit to Japan where she was inspired by Japanese screens, altering her hues and contrasting elements.
© 2022 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In Frankenthaler’s paintings of the 1980s, the formal qualities are a fusion of the metaphorical and the purely formal; “Metaphors are uncovered in the making of these works. But the artist does not paint metaphors. Their forms evoke different but similar forms and they allow of our visual substitutions. But another part of their force, and I think the larger part, resists such substitutions, at least checks them. We cannot forget how literally themselves these forms are, not only because they are tangible and individual (this is not always the case in Frankenthaler’s art), but also because they so belong where they do” (John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, New York 1989, p. 335).
PHOTO © ALEXANDER LIBERMAN, COURTESY OF THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES. ART © 2020 HELEN FRANKENTHALER / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
Frankenthaler’s method of pouring diluted acrylic paint onto the unprimed, unstretched canvas largely inspired the Color Field movement on the whole. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, both little-known artists at the time, visited her studio in 1953 and were inspired by Frankenthaler’s departure from the narrative of Abstract Expressionism of the time, dominated by an active, masculine energy. The Color Field school, rather, opted for the pure beauty of color on the canvas. While this was a step away from the mythic tales of Abstract Expressionist artists, Color Field painters did not fully separate themselves from conceptual approaches to painting.
Image © Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Art ©
With its breathtaking rhythm and potential energy, Somnambulist bears witness to a moment of both investigation and innovation in Frankenthaler’s late practice. Throughout the many chapters of her oeuvre, Frankenthaler, above all, demonstrates what it truly means to evoke emotions entwined with appreciation for the formal qualities of painting.
"A line, a color, shapes, spaces, all do one thing for and within themselves, and yet do something else, in relation to everything that is going on within the four sides [of the canvas]. A line is a line, but [also] is a color. . . . It does this here, but that there. The canvas surface is flat and yet the space extends for miles. What a lie, what trickery—how beautiful is the very idea of painting."
