(upbeat piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C. looking at a large canvas
by Helen Frankenthaler called Mountains and Sea.
- [Beth] And it dates to 1952.
- [Steven] Frankenthaler is reported
to have recently gone to Cape Breton, in norther Nova Scotia
where the mountains really do meet the sea
and we can make out a blue horizon line
on the right side of the canvas
but when we look at the center of the canvas
or the left side, this is abstract painting.
- [Beth] Abstract art emerges in the United States
in the lat 1940's, early 1950's
with artists like Jackson Pollock
and Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.
Artists who are interested in expressing ideas,
through color, through gesture and we see that here
but we see a different kind of application of paint.
- [Steven] One of the great champions
of abstract expressionism was a critic
whose name is Clement Greenburg
and Greenburg loved the way that people like Pollock
seemed to pushing ideas that had developed
in the late 19th century with people like Cezanne
and then early in the 20th century with artists like Matisse
to an even greater level of abstraction.
Pollock was willing to give up reference
to specific elements in the world.
He was painting about the act of painting.
- [Beth] Or so Greenburg theorized.
Greenburg is seeing this development
toward an interest in the materials.
The paint and the canvas, getting away from the illusionism
that western art was about for hundreds of years.
- [Steven] And belief that art would be at its strongest
if it was truthful about what it was.
What Frankenthaller develops in this canvas
is the idea that she can stain the canvas.
That the paint becomes almost like fresco,
embedded within the weave of the material.
- [Beth] As soon as we make a mark on a canvas,
our brains interpret that as a figure that sits on it.
How do you deny that illusion
that our brain immediately jumps to?
- [Steven] But Frankenthaler is not trying to enact
Clement Greenburg's theories here.
It's her direct response to the canvas.
- [Beth] And to the landscape,
to the mountains and the see of Cape Breton.
- [Steven] It is clearly a landscape at the right side
and then that completely falls apart.
- [Beth] We read the sea and the horizon line
and the blue at the right but then this vertical form
that rises towards the center tapers off towards the left
almost like a giant pyramid, looks as though
it moves toward us instead of mountains receding in space.
- [Steven] At the same time this charcoal line,
that is emphatically a drawing on the canvas.
- [Beth] And those lines feel very biomorphic to me.
Very organic and so it makes it even harder,
I think, to read a mountain there.
- [Steven] And then there are feels of color
that are also amorphous, that dissolve and cool
and paint that has been thinned
and poured into the canvas itself.
- [Beth] And sometimes the color
of that stain is indistinguishable
or very close to the color of the canvas underneath it
and you expect the staining of the paint to follow
those charcoal lines but they seem very much
independent of one another
and there are places where the paint is clearly splashed on,
other places where it's pooled and where you can see
at the edges it's a little bit thicker
'cause it's sat there longer.
- [Steven] This painting is celebrated
because it is the first painting of a group of artists
Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler,
that would use staining as a technique
to create this embedded, intentional, two dimensionality.
- [Beth] And to me, what that does
is in some ways remove that sense of the presence
of the artist which is so clear
in paintings by Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning.
You don't get that sense of gesture
that you do with those abstract expressionists
although we do have that in the drawing
and the splashes of the paint.
- [Steven] You use the word biomorphic
to refer to the shapes here
and that's a reminder of the biomorphism.
There was a part of surrealism earlier in the century.
The work for instance, of Miro or Arshile Gorky,
allowing the unconscious
to directly express itself on the canvas.
- [Beth] We can see this as an intuitive response
to the landscape, almost involving the unconscious
without representing, factually the mountains and the sea.
- [Steven] We go back to this important,
early painting by Helen Frankenthaler
because it is such a brave intersection
of all of these conflicting issues and ideas.
(upbeat piano music)