Culture Gulf

ART & ANTIQUES
February 2009

Culture Gulf
by James Panero

With his Museum of Islamic Art, the Emir of Qatar makes a bold bid to transform the desert nation into a world art center....

It was an evening out of the Arabian Nights, with the air of the Gulf hanging thick over a campsite of tents and divans. The entire art world, it seemed, had been flown in as the personal guests of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, on Nov. 22, to celebrate the opening of his new Museum of Islamic Art. There was Sheikh Hamad, the supreme monarch of the gas-rich country, sitting with his family by the upper entrance of his new museum. His guests marveled at the spectacle from the tents below, mingling in black-tie attire with local grandees dressed in white dishdashas, waiting for the doors to open to the Emir’s new museum. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed with his Silk Road ensemble from a small outdoor stage. Jeff Koons admired the pillars of flowers dotting the landscape. Damien Hirst posed for snapshots with tongue literally in cheek. Ron Wood, the Rolling Stone, made his way over a rug-covered boardwalk. "I’m knackered," he said to White Cube gallery owner Jay Jopling. Wood had missed his flight to Dubai for a party the previous night.

An array of fireworks went up around the new museum. Starbursts illuminated the water. Golden tracery mirrored the fronds of the corniche, the bay at the center of Qatar’s capital city of Doha, in which the Museum of Islamic Art now stands. "It is like the beginning of the world and the end of the world," remarked James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. "The fireworks are from another aesthetic." Speaking of his own situation as an honored guest in a Gulf state, Snyder noted, "One needs to interpret this invitation as an important development."

Many of the Emir’s assembled group of museum curators and art stars pondered the significance of the event in which they were participating. With an opening party that appeared untouched by economic concerns, the Emir was making a significant overture to world culture with the unveiling of his new museum, a Western-style institution housed in a faceted gem of a building designed by I. M. Pei.

"I think it is spectacular," said Stephen Lash, chairman of Christie’s Americas. "This is a new development in a new region. We are staring at an important part of the future." Thomas Campbell, the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, "We’re extremely supportive of what is going on here." He was heading up a contingent that included outgoing director Philippe de Montebello and president Emily Rafferty. "The kind of money they’re spending, we can’t compete with that."

Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, said, "The critical issue is that finally an Islamic nation has recognized the significance of their own culture in a major way and felt the importance of making that culture alive and valid to the entire region and beyond. They are sending a message how Islamic art could help reduce tension and go back to the fundamentals of beauty and harmony and order. This is the new world in the cradle of civilization. It is the ancient world reborn."

A hundred years ago, the oil barons of the United States converted their petrodollars into world-class art collections and the museums to house them. Today it is the energy-rich states lining the Persian Gulf (here known as the Arabian Gulf or simply "the Gulf") that are competing to do the same. The story of Qatar’s cultural ambitions begins in 1995, when Sheikh Hamad, then in his early 40s, deposed his father, who was vacationing in Switzerland, in a bloodless coup. Sheikh Khalifa had ruled Qatar since a year after its independence from Britain in 1971, but he had been slow to invest the country’s petroleum revenue in cultural improvement. Doha, now a vast construction site, continues to show signs of poor urban planning and cheap cement construction from its initial development in the 1970s.Upon his ascension, Sheikh Hamad ushered in a series of political and cultural reforms—religious tolerance, private foreign ownership, women’s suffrage, the creation of the news channel Al Jazeera—turning his conservative Islamic country into a new model for the Middle East. At the same time, the Emir invested in the technology to explore and tap the vast gas reserves beneath Qatar’s territorial waters known as the North Field, converting this one-time hamlet of pearl divers and nomadic tribesmen into the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.

An upturn in world energy prices, combined with steady oil production and increased gas exploration, has created unprecedented wealth for this small country, which is the size of Connecticut and boasts one of the world’s highest GDPs.

The same oil money that helped pay for a new skyscraper skyline rising out of the corniche has led to the creation of Qatar’s 4,500-object collection of Islamic art, with artifacts ranging over 1,400 years, from Spain to the Far East—the results of a decade-long buying spree. Backed by a blank check from the Emir, Qatar has been an unstoppable force as Islamic work came up at auction, but due to the relatively short acquisition period, the collection has been limited by the public availability of important work. Even after the Al-Thani family paid £2.9 million for the Clive of India flask in 2003, for example, it took nearly five years to negotiate its export from Britain to Qatar.

Eight years ago, after an initial architectural competition fell through, the Emir convinced Pei to take on the project to house his collection. "I started this project with the Emir," said Pei, 91, as he toured the new museum. "He asked me to do a building of this kind for Qatar to put an emphasis on culture. Here, in the oil-and-gas world, culture is not emphasized as it should be. I accepted it because of that challenge. I’ve never had the opportunity to do anything like this."

Pei researched Islamic architecture, eventually rejecting the opulence one finds in Cordoba, Spain, for the simple massing of a 13th-century ablution fountain, which he admired in the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo. Pei filtered the stepped proportions of this domed building through his modernist sensibility to create a refined structure that is a near-perfect architectural pairing of ancient and modern. It is more conservative in materials and form than other recent museum projects around the world, but its restrained opulence mirrors the elegant treasures contained within.

Project costs, like much in Qatar, remain a court secret, but no expense was spared in the museum’s construction. Pei rejected the museum’s initial proposed location and insisted his project be set off from the encroaching city on a 64-acre park of landfill extending out in the Gulf. "I didn’t choose it. I made it!" he declared of the site. The same limestone that Pei used in his addition to the Louvre was quarried and imported from Burgundy, France. Black jet mist stone was brought in from Virginia for the museum’s granite base, which extends down to the water line. Due to the desert heat, which can reach 130 degrees in the summer, much of the construction took place at night, with ice poured into the cement mix to prevent the museum’s molded coffered ceiling from cracking as it dried.

To lead Qatar’s growing cultural concerns—the Museum of Islamic Art is the first of the Emir’s many museum projects to be completed—the country drew on American and British expertise. Marie-Josée Kravis, the president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, joined the Qatar Museums Authority board two years ago and helped secure a launch event at MoMA. "Islamic experts tell me that in quality it compares to the great collections of the world," she said. A year ago Roger Mandle, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, became executive director of the QMA. "We are able to build these museums afresh, from the ground up," he said, explaining the appeal of his new appointment. "We hope to create a new paradigm for museums in the 21st century." Last summer, Oliver Watson, a one-time curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, left his post as keeper of Eastern art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to become the director of the Museum of Islamic Art. "It is an educational thing for the world," he said on opening day. "It’s not Bedouins and oil and terrorism. It’s about one of the great cultures of the world in its time. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true—if, as I hope is the case, America realizes that the Middle East is important."Behind these high-profile appointments is the leader of the ruling Al-Thani family, Emir Sheikh Hamad, and behind him a duo of powerful women: the second of his three wives, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, and their daughter Al-Mayassa. The opening of the museum became a coming-out party, of sorts, for the elegant 25-year-old Sheikha, the new public face of the Al-Thani clan, a Duke University alumna who is now taking graduate classes at Columbia. "We are truly becoming a global capital of culture," she proclaimed from the museum steps. A day later she held a surprise press conference on the museum balcony with the actor Robert De Niro to announce the creation of a Doha branch of the Tribeca Film Festival.

The cultural establishment has been wary of the Al-Thanis’ buying power. A year and a half ago, there was a small uproar over their reported $72.8 million purchase of a Mark Rothko consigned to Sotheby’s by David Rockefeller; critics gasped at the price and objected to a foreign buyer snatching up an important modernist work. The Al-Thani family’s acquisition of a multimillion-dollar Damien Hirst sculpture spoke little of artistic leadership or sound cultural investment. Then there was the scandal of Sheikh Saud Al-Thani, the Emir’s high-profile cousin and one-time principal art buyer, who was stripped of his purchasing authority in 2005 and placed under arrest for the misuse of Qatari funds.

Against this backdrop the new Museum of Islamic Art stands out as a remarkable achievement. The redevelopment of Qatar might lag half a decade behind its Gulf neighbors in the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the two most powerful principalities in the UAE, already boast glistening new cities and thriving cultural scenes. There are art fairs such as Art Paris Abu Dhabi and Art Dubai (where this year the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, worth $1 million, will be handed out), and galleries such as Dubai’s Third Line, which recently opened an outlet in Doha. The emirate of Sharjah is making its mark with the Sharjah Biennial, which coincides with Art Dubai this March. And for the past three years, Abu Dhabi has been making headlines with its monumental proposal for the development of Saadiyat Island, which is to include a Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry and a branch of the Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel (the Louvre’s naming rights alone are reported to have cost $500 million).

The opening of the Museum of Islamic Art might be a minor event compared to the plans for Saadiyat Island, but Qatar has distinguished itself by founding a museum that, in Mandle’s words, is "not about glitz, how big it is, how much it costs, but how good it is." As an independent institution, the museum resists the allure of Culture Inc. that one sees in the franchised development of Saadiyat. It also contrasts with Qatar’s own "Education City," with branch campuses of six American universities, including Georgetown, Cornell and Texas A&M, which come off as dislocated outposts of imported culture—replete with banners of football players and "Welcome Home Aggies"—rising out the desert sands. After initial talks, Yale balked at opening a branch campus of its own in Qatar, over the requirement that it award undergraduate diplomas indistinguishable from the ones handed out in New Haven.

With a notable collection that is set to grow, a contextualized architectural landmark and a seasoned staff to study, conserve and display the art inside, Qatar has raised the bar of its cultural ambitions. For the emirate’s contentious Middle Eastern neighbors—Qatar’s precious gas claim abuts Iran’s—the museum speaks to the beauty of a shared civilization. For the West it communicates a view of the Islamic world that looks past the latest terrible headlines.

So as the doors opened, the guests—an assembly of cultural luminaries, imported like much else in Qatar from New York, Paris and London—made their way inside. Hirst was full of praise for his collector’s new museum. "Brilliant. I’m so busy looking at the building I can’t focus on the art," he remarked in a room of brass astrolabes, the astronomical computers of Islamic science. "This is where it all comes from, the past." De Montebello, meanwhile, absorbed his surroundings with more reserve. "Floor-to-ceiling vitrines—if you can afford them," he remarked, overlooking a room of glazed earthenware from ninth-century Iraq and a jade pendant made for the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal.

With the opening of its Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar has made a serious play in the art world. Now it remains to be seen whether the country can operate an institution up to international standards. Its intentions are good and its buying power is unrivaled, but Qatar has yet to convince the West of its full ability to run a serious museum. In a world where money is no object, the approbation of the museum establishment is one commodity that still needs to be earned.

Evolution for Art's Sake

CITY JOURNAL
"Evolution for Art’s Sake"
Denis Dutton’s Darwinian aesthetics
by James Panero

a review of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $25)

This year marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. An international Darwin Day is set for February 12, the biologist’s birthday. But the annus mirabilis is off to an early start with the publication of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, a Darwinian attempt to explain humanity’s interest in art. Dutton may not be a household name, but his Web portal Arts & Letters Daily has become an international phenomenon, a virtual Galapagos of cultural interest, since he formed it out of an e-mail newsletter in 1998. A professor in the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Dutton has now written a book full of observations that again demonstrate his uncanny ability to collect complex arguments and present them as thought-provoking statements.

Dutton builds a bold cross-cultural argument: we all have a prehistoric “art instinct” programmed into our genes through natural and sexual selection. The Art Instinct begins with the results of a recent survey of international artistic taste, which concluded that “people in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of pictorial representation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals”—images that we often find in the kitschy world of calendar art. How to explain such universal taste? “The calendar industry has not conspired to influence taste,” Dutton writes, “but rather caters to preexisting, precalendrical human preferences.”

Dutton’s belief in a universal urge for art finds common ground with older aesthetic theories, from the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant to the spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenborg to the Kunstwollen of Alois Riegl. But the idea of universality in the arts has been under attack ever since Continental critical theory took over the academy and went after connoisseurship as a social construction. “The whole idea that art worlds are monadically sealed off from one another is daft,” Dutton counters. “Do we need to be reminded that Chopin is loved in Korea, that Spaniards collect Japanese prints, or that Cervantes is read in Chicago and Shakespeare enjoyed in China? . . . Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.”

Dutton devotes quite a bit of space to setting up his premise, arguing exhaustively with theorists like Arthur C. Danto about the definition of art. Dutton’s philosophical ground-setting may be academically responsible, but Chapters Three and Four (“What is Art?” and “‘But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art’”) are uphill work—directed, it seems, more at a university audience than at the general reader.

Once Dutton arrives at his central thesis, The Art Instinct becomes an altogether better read. The Pleistocene age lasted for 80,000 generations of humans and protohumans, Dutton writes, “against a mere five hundred generations since the first cities.” For the human race, the survival of the fittest—a term coined by the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, not by Darwin himself—played out in these long years. The people of the Pleistocene most likely found time for leisure, Dutton argues, and in the arts they developed the adaptive traits that aided in socialization and sexual selection. “It is inconceivable that Pleistocene people did not have a vivid intellectual and creative life,” he writes. “This life would have found expression in song, dance, and imaginative speech—skills that matched in complexity and sophistication what we know of Pleistocene jewelry, painting, and carving.” Through the arts, early man learned to see the world. “This intense interest in art as emotional expression derives from wanting to see through art into another human personality: it springs from a desire for knowledge of another person. . . . Talking about art is an indirect way of talking about the inner lives of other people.”

Here Dutton cites Darwin’s most controversial book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and its portrayal of “the mind as a sexual ornament.” Think of the arts as something akin to the peacock’s tail, Dutton writes. The peacock’s wasteful piece of plumage is useless—in fact, a hindrance—when it comes to foraging for food or escaping from predators. Nevertheless, its tail is attractive to peahens precisely because it is an opulent display of extra resources, one that says this peacock is doing better than just scraping by in the world of peafowl. For early man, a social animal, survival likewise not only favored the strongest, but also “the cleverest, wittiest, and wisest.” Just as “the evolutionary function of language is not only to be a means of efficient communication but to be a signal of fitness and general intelligence,” Dutton writes, “sexual selection was building a more interesting human personality, one that we have come to know as convivial, imaginative, gossipy, and gregarious, with a taste for the dramatic.” The art instinct is closely connected with this sexual selection. Simply put, the arts have sex appeal, and it should come as little surprise, Dutton writes, that “love is poetry’s natural subject.”

There are, of course, plenty of counterarguments against Dutton’s “art instinct.” The most obvious is that artists in recorded history often seem to have little interest in procreation, whether because of homosexuality, social dysfunction, or simple lack of interest. Cyril Connolly was on to something when he tartly wrote that “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” Art-making often seems to be a distraction from, or even a stand-in for, sexual reproduction.

Another concern is that art history is already besotted with theory. About the only place one finds Marx or Freud read with any sense of relevance nowadays is in the study of the humanities, with art history being no exception. (By contrast, try finding Freud discussed in a psychology class with anything but historical interest.) Does Dutton expect us to add Darwinism to the dysfunctional set of Marxist and Freudian master keys? Fortunately, it appears not: “No philosophy of art can succeed if it ignores either art’s natural sources or its cultural character,” he writes, hoping to expand our range of inquiry rather than limit it.

Darwinism is, nevertheless, still a theory of its own, no more so than in the study of Dutton’s “art instinct.” Dutton builds his case on speculation. He constructs a story line that must be reverse-engineered back from the present day. He devotes little attention to what early artistic evidence we do have, such as the cave paintings of Lascaux. Likewise, Dutton could have compared the art of early recorded civilizations: they should exhibit similar artistic practices, according to Dutton’s thesis, even if they developed at opposite ends of the globe.

Still Dutton’s central premise is worth repeating. “What sexual selection in evolution does,” he writes, “is give us an explanation of why so much human energy has been exhausted on objects of the most extreme elegance and complexity—not just the massive symmetry of the Pyramids, but the poignancy of Shakespeare’s sonnets or the Schubert Quintet in C.” It’s a remarkable idea and one that deserves exploration through the historical evidence, both what we have on hand and what remains to be uncovered. The Art Instinct is an important first step in that process—a hyperlink to future conversations.

Gallery chronicle (January 2009)

Helen Frankenthaler, A Green Thought in a Green Shade (1981),
© Helen Frankenthaler / courtesy Knoedler & Company

THE NEW CRITERION
JANUARY 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades” at Knoedler & Co., New York.

Living masters have it rough, and Helen Frankenthaler has been living as a master for over half a century. In 1952, at the age of only twenty-three, she created Mountains and Sea, an iconic painting that forever secured her place in the history of art. It was a work that at once defined Frankenthaler’s style and changed the visual texture of abstract painting. Mountains and Sea built on the achievements of Jackson Pollock with its poured paint and rolled-out canvas—but it also outdid Pollock. With its thinned pigments soaked directly into linen, it displayed a new artistic temperament, subsuming the artistic ego into forms of color that absorbed the Abstract Expressionist gesture into an all-over stain. It paved the way for an entire new school of American abstraction known as Color Field, with Frankenthaler’s experimentation leading to the lush mannerisms of Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Unfortunately, nothing hurts a career more than an impeccable reputation, especially in the annals of modernism. Without a doubt, Helen Frankenthaler’s standing today has been diminished by her historical significance. Few would deny her importance, but the fidelity of her artistic vision, which has remained remarkably pure for half a century, has yet to receive its full due.

In a tribute to Frankenthaler’s eightieth birthday this past December, Knoedler has mounted a small survey of paintings spanning six decades, selected by Karen Wilkin from the artist’s own collection.[1] The best argument for Frankenthaler’s importance is not her textbook relevance but the authority of her work.

A Green Thought in a Green Shade (1981), the enormous work that looks back from the far wall of the gallery, comes off as a painterly ecosystem, with algae blooms swirling in a liquid medium. On one of my visits, I noticed two patrons transfixed by this painting, with their noses a few inches from the canvas for what must have been an hour. Frankenthaler employs such a masterly, easy touch that she can let her work, you might say, work on its own, with biomorphic forms bubbling up and dissolving from view not as a vision of the artist’s unconscious but rather as a vision of the canvas’s unconscious, if that’s at all possible.

American museumgoers were reminded of Frankenthaler’s particular touch over the past year. Mountains and Sea temporarily left its permanent home at the National Gallery in Washington for a multi-city tour as part of “Action/Abstraction,” an exhibition that looked at the evolution of American painting through the influence of the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. In the court of public opinion, Frankenthaler’s reputation has been tied to Clement Greenberg’s own approval ratings, a disservice to the artist and to the historical record, as Greenberg’s theories of flatness and the direction of abstract art owe more to Frankenthaler’s development on canvas than the other way around.

And Frankenthaler’s public esteem has suffered in other ways as well. Consider her biography of family privilege, against which she never rebelled. There is also her cosmopolitan style and her physical beauty—not for nothing, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour portrayed her in the recent biopic of Jackson Pollock. Frankenthaler never bared the tortured soul that is often assumed to be at the heart of important art (one reason, perhaps, why the reputation of Joan Mitchell, a lesser contemporary of Frankenthaler’s and a notoriously foul-mouthed drinker, has recently been on the rise). There has also been Frankenthaler’s resistance to identity politics. She has made little of her position as a groundbreaking woman in the arts. This decision speaks to an inner confidence; she knows she is a groundbreaking artist, regardless of gender. And finally there is her resistance to serialism and the demands of a marketplace that says it wants newness but really seeks more of the same. She could have turned Mountains and Sea into a commodity, producing variations on the theme. Instead, she passed up ready-made labeling, packaging, and selling for a life of pure artistic pursuit.

Which was why seeing Mountains and Sea in “Action/Abstraction,” removed from its usual context in Washington, had been a delight. For such a well-known painting it is still awesome and strange, with its lyrical hints of landscape dissolving into sunspots, which further separate out into oil stains and untreated white canvas. There is an unexplainable beauty at its heart. Frankenthaler is the American Fauve, and she shares several similarities with Henri Matisse. Both artists staked their claim in color rather than tone, and both artists have been accused of bourgeois sentiment, choosing to channel their energies directly into their work rather than into their biographies. For Frankenthaler this process became quite literal. She never battled her way to a high style. There were no decades of experimentation before arriving at a signature work; her signature work began as experimentation filtered through her artistic intuition. Experimentation, in fact, has been the one quality that has defined her oeuvre as she has gone from painting to drawing to printmaking to metal sculpture to pottery and back again.

You might also say that Frankenthaler arrived on the scene at a soaking-in moment for American art. Her achievement was to develop a way to translate this mood directly to canvas. The battles against European surrealism and homegrown regionalism had been fought and won, if not in the public’s mind, then at least for its forward-looking artists of Abstract Expressionism. Frankenthaler never felt compelled to fight a Freudian-like death match with the Beaux-Arts in the manner of de Kooning or to channel Pollock’s Indian rain dance. To do so would have been pantomime. The language of abstraction had already evolved into a lingua franca, and it no longer required overt gesticulation. Frankenthaler purified this language in shapes and colors. Through her thinned pigments and nimble physicality, she discovered how to execute a vision on canvas that removed the evidence of artistic will and seemed to bring forward forms already buried deep in the picture plane.

Recently, in The Wall Street Journal, William Agee described Frankenthaler’s particular journey to Mountains and Sea:

In August 1952, Ms. Frankenthaler traveled to Nova Scotia, where she continued her practice of doing small landscapes. She painted in watercolor and oil on paper, working freely from nature. These studies helped to keep her limber and flexible, like a dancer or athlete tuning up or, as was the case here, a painter preparing for a major new effort.

On the afternoon of Oct. 29, back in New York, she tacked a large—roughly 7-by-10-foot—piece of untreated canvas to the floor of her studio to begin the largest painting she had ever undertaken. Her mind and her arms were filled with memories of the spectacular Cape Breton landscape. After roughing in a few charcoal marks as an initial guide, she poured highly thinned oil paint from coffee cans directly onto the canvas, as if she were drawing with color. She had no plan; she just worked, with control and discipline. At the end of the afternoon, when she had finished, she climbed on a ladder and studied the painting. She was not yet sure what she had done; she was “sort of amazed and surprised and interested.” … It soon became clear that what she had done was invent a new way of making art.

Once you understand Mountains and Sea as something altogether different from the premeditated “next step,” the unprogrammatic nature of Frankenthaler’s career-long output makes perfect sense. The catalogue that accompanies this latest Knoedler show is a delight, because it economically divides her paintings by decade, assigning a full-page studio shot to each. The 1950s photograph shows Frankenthaler with her hair loosely pulled back, her white shirtsleeves rolled up, waving her arm over the canvas like a conductor calling forth a response. Western Dream (1957), the work on display from this decade at Knoedler, is a diffuse assembly of sun shapes and pictographs resembling an accretion of graffiti, with flattened lizards and what might be a rabbit and who knows what else. There’s a little too much iconography here to work as a landscape and not enough to be read as a rebus, and so the picture never quite comes together as a whole, certainly not as well as Mountains and Sea. The image also suffers from the evidence of too much hand, too much artistic will, even with the poured-in oils.

The photograph of Frankenthaler from a decade later shows the artist taking another step back as she lets fuller fields of color bleed into the canvas through a sponge. Provincetown I (1961) takes the notion of the canvas as picture window and gives it a life of its own. The semblance of a drawn-in frame and the image it contained melts and folds into abstract shapes of blue, red, and brown. Pink Lady (1963), just two years later and now acrylic rather than oil, takes a further turn, as the paint spreads out from a center black line as if by tectonic process, without the artist anywhere in sight.

By the 1970s the internal rhythm of her paintings had shifted to a slower beat. The photograph from this period shows her walking away from a work in progress with a sheet of paper in hand while pointing back, as if issuing the watering instructions for something now growing on its own. Sphinx (1976), a closed-mouth assembly of orange, brown, and gray, really does keep its riddles to itself, perhaps a little too much, as a monument reduced to ruin.

The 1980s photograph shows Frankenthaler bending over a large canvas with a brush and paint can in hand, bringing a synthesis of stained and poured techniques to works like A Green Thought in a Green Shade, the highlight of the show. The 1990s, at least as represented here, come off rather poorly by comparison, as Snow Basin (1990) flirts with frosting, The Rake’s Progress (1991) attempts a visual pun (the paint has been scraped by the teeth of a rake), and Aerie (1995), with its looping swirls, seems too preconceived.

The current decade brings her back into her majesty. The athleticism required of her enormous earlier canvases has given way to repose and modestly sized work of great intellectual complexity. Knoedler’s 2003 exhibition of new Frankenthaler paintings demonstrated just how good she had become in the last several years, in many ways at the peak of her powers, and one of these paintings, Warming Trend (2002), has returned for this show.

“What I want,” Matisse famously said, “is an art of balance, purity, an art that won’t disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my paintings.” Luxe, calme, et volupté: All three are now on view at Knoedler.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. “Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades” opened at Knoedler & Co., New York, on November 6, 2008 and remains on view through January 10, 2009. Go back to the text.