   
|
 |
|
Helen Frankenthaler Captain's Watch, 1986 acrylic on canvas 76 3/4 x 58 3/4 in. “Instead of masterly, you want to be -- well, two words I frequently use -- clumsy or puzzled.”1 Helen Frankenthaler At first glance that may seem an odd statement from the creator of a painting like Captain’s Watch. Masterly seems exactly the word for its balance of color against color, shape against line, flowing, transparent wash against opaque pigment that sticks and skips as the brush drags it across the canvas. But the ideas associated with a word like masterly are suspect in recent writing on art: masterly handling of paint calls up the image of John Singer Sargent rather than Cézanne, of paintings whose splendid surfaces veil an inner emptiness. Clumsy and puzzled, by contrast, are natural attributes of the artist who is an explorer of new territory, who does things wrong because in a new context there is no right way to do them yet. The risks and triumphs of exploration are key elements in the mythos of Abstract Expressionism, the mid-century style of painting from which Frankenthaler’s art emerges. One may suspect that for her masterly represents both a temptation and a danger. Yet paradoxically, courting temptation and danger is still another form of exploration. Sometimes the real risk is in seeming to play it safe, and that is what Captain’s Watch seems to do. The muted harmony of gray and brown in Captain’s Watch is accented primarily by a brash pink “figure” at the top, an homage to Abstract Expressionist gestural painting. Apart from this figure the painting has a calm elegance, with vertical and horizontal marks repeatedly echoing the edges of the canvas. Frankenthaler plays with those edges, accenting them with strips of blue, with a flow of gray paint that barely caresses the left border, with a white splash along the bottom edge, and, at the upper right, with a miniature offspring of the pink and gray figure. Overall, Captain’s Watch is a compendium of the ways that paint can behave: hard edges, soft edges, one color dragged across another, one color flowing through another, and color applied as if the brush were a pencil drawing lines. Also, perhaps coincidentally, it is a compendium of the way forms and colors behave in the real world, from the sharp edge of a cliff against the sky to the subtle shades of a morning mist. At the left the gray shape flows up vertically like the mountains in Chinese painting; at the right it spreads in horizontal strata like a mesa in the American southwest. The pink gesture and the edge-play keep us away from a literal reading of landscape and bring us back to the painting as a two-dimensional arrangement, but it is not simply that. Without any obvious indications of space, it is a spacious painting. Although Frankenthaler has not encouraged interpretation of the titles of her paintings, their poetic phraseology is a lure to commentators. Captain’s Watch is ambiguous: the captain (at least on an American naval vessel) does not stand watch. But of course it is the captain who is ultimately responsible for the ship, and if he is standing watch he is doubly responsible. The analogy of artistic creation to a voyage – a dangerous voyage – is an old one, but particularly apt for Frankenthaler’s intuitive, exploratory art. The title suggests a combination of risk and careful control that is equally apt for this particular painting. Timothy Riggs |