Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [129]
An intellectual who wrestled with profound philosophic and religious issues, Newman tried to find innovative visual equivalents for his mystical concerns, as in his Stations of the Cross series at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. The colossal scale of his canvases (one painting is 17 feet wide) was indispensable to his meaning. “Scale equals feeling,” Newman said. To him the “void” relieved only by a stripe looked sublime, full of light, meaning, and “the chaos of ecstasy.”
Newman, “Day One,” 1951-52, Whitney, NY. Newman is known for monochromatic fields of color relieved by a contrasting stripe.
Frankenthaler, “The Bay,” 1963, Detroit Institute of Arts. Frankenthaler developed stain painting because, she said, the paint “cried out to be soaked, not resting” on top of the canvas.
NEWMAN’S PASSION
Barnett Newman painted a fourteen-work series (1958-66) on unprimed canvas using only black and white paints. The austere pictures, each composed of a couple of stripes, indicate the fourteen stages of Christ’s Passion from trial to entombment. When attending a formal dinner at New York’s Plaza Hotel, Newman, dignified in his tuxedo and monocle, spotted a priest and asked, “Have you seen my Stations of the Cross paintings? I showed them at the Vatican, and the Pope told me I had brought Christianity into the twentieth century.” The painter Lee Krasner, for whom art was the one true religion, snapped, “For Christ’s sake, Barney, isn’t that a little pretentious?”
FRANKENTHALER: STAIN PAINTING. When New York painter Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) first saw Jackson Pollock’s black-and-white work, she was stunned. “It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country but didn’t know the language,” she said, “but was eager to live there ... and master the language.” Soon after, she visited Pollock’s studio and learned his pouring technique. In 1952 she combined two sources of inspiration: Pollock’s methods and John Marin’s watercolors. With oil thinned to the consistency of watercolor and unprimed sailcloth tacked to the floor, she poured paint from coffee cans, guiding its flow with sponges and wipers.
The unique stain paintings that resulted exist at the crossroads between chance and control. “I think accidents are lucky,” Frankenthaler said, “only if you know how to use them.” Frankenthaler’s colorful shapes float like swollen calligraphy. Because the thin washes of pigment soak into the canvas rather than rest on top of it, the white fabric shines through, irradiating the color with light like stained glass. Denser zones contrast vividly against the open, expansive field of lush color.
LOUIS: VEILS AND VARIATIONS. American artist Morris Louis (1912-62) discovered his style when he saw what Frankenthaler was doing. Her work, he said, was “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.” Morris perfected the spontaneous-but-composed method of staining canvas. He poured diluted acrylic paint, tilting his unprimed canvas to guide the flow into several characteristic forms: veils, stripes, and florals. By relying solely on the directed fall of paint, Louis produced paintings without a single brushstroke. With the “handwriting” of the painter gone, his works communicated purely through color.
A Louis trademark was the “veil” painting: overlapping fans of color produced by pouring pigment down vertically placed canvases. He also created “floral” patterns of smoky color that flare out in scallops. His “stripes” run from top to bottom in multicolored canals of color. Louis experimented with leaving a huge empty space in the middle of his canvases, framed by diagonal bands of color at the corners. The central white space, more than a negative void, packs a positive punch.