The end of World War II signaled a vast new beginning. Life pulsed with hope as people eagerly embraced change. French couturier Christian Dior tossed aside the war’s strictures against using fabric for fashion and premiered his extravagent “New Look” in 1947–a retro salute to “radical femininity” that featured tight-fitting jackets, padded hips, and yards of flowing A-line skirts. Carmel Snow, editor of America’s HARPER’S BAZAAR, tagged Dior’s fashion by exclaiming “It’s quite a revolution…Your dresses have such a new look!”

France also contributed an avant-garde cinema, touting “The New Wave” as “a new means of expression on the same level as painting and the novel…by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract.” (Quote from Alexander Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde,” March 30, 1948.

In America, life was transformed as soldiers returned to work. Women left their wartime jobs and rediscovered their aprons, and television celebrated this new domestic tranquility with such popular programs as OZZIE AND HARRIET and LEAVE IT TO BEAVER. But it was also an age of contrast. The descent of an ‘iron curtain’ launched the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union, and McCarthyism raged unchallenged. At the same time, Broadway  resounded with such new hit musicals as SOUTH PACIFIC and CAROUSEL. In THE FREE WORLD; ART AND THOUGHT IN THE COLD WAR, Louis Menand argues that such contrasting cultural and political movements reflected a willingness to explore the “new”—that the postwar was a time when “Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered” (Preface, p. xii).

American art was part of this cultural transformation, led by a group of Abstract Expressionist painters–notably Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko–who were shifting the center of the art world from war-torn Paris to New York, where many of them worked in Greenwich Village lofts.

Was AbEx art really the exclusive domain of male artists? Of course not, although it’s taken the art world decades to figure this out.  In 2018, Mary Gabriel’s NINTH STREET WOMEN dismissed this sexist canard and focused on five women artists–Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler–who were equal partners in the postwar modern art movement.

Gabriel’s book brilliantly described the layers connecting artists who lived in close proximity around Greenwich Village’s Ninth Street.  Most of all, she buried the idea that modern art’s iconic figures were exclusively male.
Now Alexander Nemerov has joined in with FIERCE POISE; HELEN FRANKENTHALER AND 1950s NEW YORK.  A professor of art history at Stanford, Nemerov has written about numerous aspects of American art and culture, including SOULMAKER; THE TIMES OF LEWIS HINE  and  SUMMONING PEARL HARBOR.

He calls his decision to spotlight Frankenthaler as a very personal one. He first thought of writing about her twenty years ago when he was in his thirties–“I loved her pictures and sensed a deep connection with them.” His father, poet Howard Nemerov, had taught Frankenthaler at Bennington, and though young Alexander never met her, he felt such a proximity to her that he calls her “Helen” throughout this book.  He also explains that he waited to write about her until now because “I was not ready…I was afraid, unwilling and unable to acknowledge the depths her paintings stirred in me, the person her art patiently waited for me to become” (xiii).

Nemerov also suggests that the times had to change, arguing that fifty years ago the world only cheered an “art of disquiet and challenge, of abrupt and shocking outcry.”  In contrast, Frankenthaler’s paintings radiated bright colors and pleasure. Nemerov celebrates their joy:  “She saw things the rest of us miss: the neon sign’s reflection in a wintry puddle, the cream of dirty white at the lip of the wave.  She rhymed these sensations with her own feelings–the world she encountered was the world she felt.” (xiv)

FIERCE POISE is too sketchy to be called a biography, but Nemerov has organized it to showcase Frankenthaler’s formative decade—years when, freshly graduated from Bennington, she was swept into the center of the New York art scene by attaching herself to critic Clement Greenberg, whose pronouncements were then viewed as dictates from the mountaintop. As Nemerov writes in his introduction, “She had money, she had means, and she knew how to get ahead.”  Connecting with Greenberg almost instantly placed Frankenthaler in the center of the New York art scene.

Nemerov has created the eleven chapters of FIERCE POISE as chief moments defining Frankenthaler’s formative decade.  Chapter One is dated May 19, 1950–“Hotel Astor: Arrival”–followed by such chapter/moments as “October 26, 1952: New York–Desire is the Theme of All Life.” Other chapters are set in Madrid, Paris, Bennington, and Falmouth, Massachusetts, before the book ends with “January 26, 1960–New York: Curtain Call.”

“Nemerov describes how Frankenthaler saw Pollack’s paintings as ‘perpetually energized, always new, never freezing into static and fossilized forms.'”

A key chapter describes the moment that Frankenthaler recognized her artistic vision. On November 12, 1951, Greenberg took her to an exhibition of Jackson Pollock’s new drip paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery. She had no clue who Pollock was, but his giant murals overwhelmed her. She told Greenberg that the paintings “thrilled me” (28).

 Most of all, she sensed a kindred spirit in his liberating technique. Pollock tossed away his paint brushes and used raw canvas rolled out on the floor. He would take a paint-laden stick, or sometimes a turkey baster or a can of paint punctured with a can opener, and walk around the canvas to pour paint in swirls and dots that were both controlled and improvised.  Nemerov describes how Frankenthaler saw Pollack’s paintings as “perpetually energized, always new, never freezing into static and fossilized forms.”  What they made her understand–and what she instantly applied to her own artistic vision–was a sense of liberation. Pollack’s drip paintings “opened upt what one’s own inventiveness could take off from” (30).

Frankenthaler began to forge her own technique, pouring pools of highly-diluted paint onto raw canvas. The pigments soaked into the fabric and stained it with shimmers of color. Her breakthrough painting was  her 1952 “Mountains and Sea,” which Nemerov writes had a sense of “art spilling out.”  The painting was created on an unprimed 7-by-10 foot canvas, and she laid the pigments down thinned with turpentine. Nemerov  explains that “the overwhelming effect of Helen’s painting is of swaths of color dissolving as they come into being–of forms disdaining to become hardened shapes of nameable things and remaining in a lyric world of daydream.” Hers was a world of feeling (57).

Nemerov never overstates his purpose in writing FIERCE POISE. He clearly intends this book to be a sketch rather than a full-scale portrait. But the title itself made me curious–Nemerov is a word person, so how did he come up with FIERCE POISE?  It has no direct reference, so he seems to have invented it. Would he have used such terms to describe a male artist?  Of course not, but sexism aside, why this title?

I rummaged around and discovered that critic John Ruskin–whose importance in the 19th century paralleled Greenberg’s in the 20th–used these words in writing about “The Mountain Gloom” in MODERN PAINTERS. Nemerov knows much about Ruskin and perhaps was struck by the similarity of Frankenthaler’s  expression of “felt experience” in her painting “Mountains and Sea,” with Ruskin’s rhapsody that, for him, the vision of mountain character was a sublime experience:  while the “green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all slope together in the sunshine,” nearby “with everlasting roar in the twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down … forcing fierce way beneath their ghastly poise.“

Title puzzle aside, Nemerov’s decision to focus only on Frankenthaler’s formative decade leaves readers to discover the rest of her life on their own. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2001, and when she died in 2011 at the age of 83, she was recognized as a full-fledged member of the artistic pantheon.

FIERCE POISE is an intriguing, highly-personal sketch. Above all, it demonstrates the need for a full-scale biography of Helen Frankenthaler—–and one that isn’t entrapped by the decade she escaped.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor

Alexander Nemerov, FIERCE POISE; HELEN FRANKENTHALER AND 1950s NEW YORK.  Penguin Press: NY, 2021. 269 pp., illustrations.