New Writings in American Art: Virtual Conversation with Alexander Nemerov
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On April 8, 2021, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) presented a virtual conversation featuring author and professor Alexander Nemerov in conversation with Virginia M. Mecklenburg, senior curator at SAAM. Learn more about Nemerov’s most recent publication, “Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York” (2021). This publication chronicles the early career of artist Helen Frankenthaler. Go on back in time to the creative boom of 1950’s New York City and learn more about the boundary-breaking early life of Frankenthaler and discover how she succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period.
Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thomas Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and department chair of art and art history at Stanford University. In 2019, he received the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. He is also the author of several books, including “Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine” (2016) and “Summoning Pearl Harbor” (2017).
This program is part of SAAM’s ongoing series New Writings in American Art, highlighting new scholarship and publications in the field of American Art.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Well, thank you so much, Virginia. Wow, really nice introduction, and especially coming from someone I've known so long, and who represents, obviously, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or as it was called the NMAA back in 1987, when I dropped that fateful letter in the mailbox, hoping for a summer internship or whatever it was, and that was, at that time was a good piece of correspondence, because that's how it got started for me. And SAAM is a place very close to my heart, and to my intellectual formation, which are almost one in the same thing. So it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well, we're glad you are writing, and at some point toward the end of our conversation maybe you'll tell us about what you're working on next.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Absolutely, yeah.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Absolutely. Anyway, so let's talk about Helen Frankenthaler, and what was essentially the formative decade of her career, the 1950s. I want to start, actually, excuse me, the way you start in the book. You talk about feeling a personal collection to Helen Frankenthaler, because she was a student of your father's at Bennington. And talk to us about how that came about, how it prompted you to write, what I think is probably one of the most unique books on Frankenthaler that I have ever read.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, well, thank you. Well by the time I was born in 1963, it was actually towards the of my father's 18-year time at Bennington. But in his very first year as a teacher there in 1948-'49, that was Helen's senior year. And so although I didn't know her at all, never met her, though I probably could have met her when we both lived in Connecticut in the early 2000s, yes, I felt some connection to her. And I can remember actually, as far back as the 1990s, saying to my wife that I feel like I can write a book on Helen Frankenthaler, but I wasn't smart enough or wise enough to be able to do it then. There was a long foreground to this book, let's say, and eventually, I felt ready, or I felt sort of able to relate to Helen, that we could have a conversation, albeit without her being literally present. And that's a little bit of how it came about.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well, it ultimately does feel like that you have had this conversation with Helen. One of the things for me that's fascinating is the way you structured the book, instead of chapter 1, 2, 3, you've picked out one day, or in some cases it's a two-day period. Here are the 1950s and 1960, and made that sort of the focal point around which you create and tell. How did you decide to do that?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, it's such a good question. That always was the concept, even when I was pitching the book, it was going to be written around specific days, one day, or in one case, as you say, two days per year, from 1950 when Helen was 20, all the way up to 1960. And the reason I chose to do it that way, Virginia, is because it seemed to have a piece with Helen's art. The thing that I really love about Helen's paintings is they sort of are able to portray the fluidity of lived experience without killing it, you know? The metaphor I always use is instead of the butterfly collector snaring the butterfly in a net and then pasting its dead body in an album in order to portray it, she was able to portray life on the wing that ecstatic, ephemeral, but mysteriously enduring experience, which I think is common to all of us. We can all relate to it. I'm looking at the play of sun and shadow on the street outside my window right now. It's there, it's palpitating, pulsing for us every day. And yet we don't necessarily attune to that, but Helen saw it and portrayed it through the medium of her feelings, and that determined the structure of the days.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well, I thought the ones that you chose were really apt because each day constitutes a moment that becomes, not just an episode, but like a pillar of experience in her life.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Mhm, yeah, that's a good phrase. Yeah.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) The way she thinks, oh, about the world, about the art world, and about herself, as she is going from, what, a 21-year-old, just recent college grad, into one of the most really sought-after women artists of that period.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yes, yeah. Yeah. So yes, you're right. You say “pillar of experience;” I think that's good. I mean, just as on any given day that we might find especially momentous in our own lives there's a condensation of experience, something significant happens, yes, but beyond that there's a way that any day on Earth is to do with recollections of who we were, of perhaps a little fear and excitement about who we may become. In other words, it's not a singular simple chronological matter, to just say, “Well, on this day, I was doing this,” as though life were a Filofax or just a calendar, right? That it's much more complicated; time is much more mysterious than that. So these pillars or intensification of life, I think she was able to really portray. Her work is a kind of philosophy of the moment of what it's like to be alive in the world. And, of course, for her about being a woman in the 1950s, a young woman. It's very much of a young person's book, about being a young person, about being in your 20s, as I was when I started at the NMAA, and there, I think that special intensity of life as lived when one is young, is a big part of the book too, a big part of my decision to write it about that time in Helen's life.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Yeah, she does come across with all of the complexities of a 20, 22, 25, 26-year-old. I mean, that's one of the things that I find most engaging about her. I mean, she has all of the sort of fears and the fantasies that, ultimately, before you, or as you are forming who you are, your personal belief systems, because when you come out of college, you still have a ways to go before you know quite who you are, and what's most important in your life.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, that's so beautifully said, and I have to say not wanting to overshare, as people say, but I don't think it's really struck me fully until this conversation how much the book has been, for me, about experiencing who I was in my 20s, belatedly, or kind of recognizing that. And you talk about fears and pleasures and things like this, the book is not at all autobiographical, but it's written through the medium of my own engagement, identification with the artist I don't call Frankenthaler in the book, but call Helen, you know? And I think the way I express it in the book is that it took me until my 50s, I'm 57 now, to be able to catch up to who Helen was in her 20s, where she's portraying in real time what it's like to be alive in her 20s. However what I'm able to find, not just as a philosophy in life now, is also that special experience that I, too, had. I just didn't have the means to articulate it like she did, you know? How to look at art and why, right? I'm just about to teach a course tonight, another lecture in this course I'm doing on van Gogh, you better be ready to talk about how to look at art and why, with him, right? I mean, but it's exhilarating. That should be the question; it should be the question of every book about art, every lecture about art, every exhibition about art, you know? So one of the few pleasures of middle age is, I think, just becoming a little wiser in that respect, and seeing that that's what is really at stake in all this. But to go back to the point about the 20s, yes, Helen she had a kind of psychosomatically messy adolescence, after the death of her father when she was 11. She came out of that, but I think was hurt and depressive, from that. Art saved her, in many ways, gave her a basis for finding joy and pleasure in life, or accessing the joy and pleasure that was within her always but had been sort of stunted or deflected by trauma and depression, neuroses, etc. But the work that I write about with such feeling, I think, when she was in her 20s, is all about that messiness that continued with her the 20s, as you say, a time of fear, doubt, depression, confusion, all these things, you know. And Helen's work as she got older, I think, became more achieved, more grandeur. SAAM's painting, “Small's Paradise,” is a good example of that wonderful, but it's not as vibrantly raw, let's say, as the work in the 50s. Yeah.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Yeah, something like “Mountains and Sea,” which was her first poured stained painting. I mean, it's an elusive picture in the sense that you can't get your hands around it. There is too much. I mean, it's light and it's air and it's space and it's color. It's so many things that you can't nail any of them down. I'll have to say, I was really struck, too, by, frankly, how gutsy Helen was in the 1950s. On one hand, she goes to the Artist Equity Ball dressed in this costume, that's sort of a Picasso-figure costume with her friend, and manages to get her photograph in “Life Magazine.” That's pretty out there for somebody who is just showing up on the scene, but she's also circulating in the world of the guys they called the Irascibles, all of those painters who were they look like bankers dressed in their business suits, but (unintelligible 18:39) know who they are. You realize that they're pushing back at pretty much everything. (Unintelligible 18:47) we thought about art. And she just flung herself into the midst of this small, admittedly small universe, but it was an exciting universe.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, she took every bit of the courage and kind of hutzpah that I think her parents instilled in her, for better and for worse, as the chosen child of the three Frankenthaler daughters. The book relates how Helen's father, when she was just a little girl, sort of moving along the sidewalks of Manhattan in the 1930s, walking in front of her parents he would say to his wife, “Watch that girl; she's going to be fantastic,” you know, and I think Helen, I'm sure, was listening, and she took it to heart because I think that helped her a lot. She didn't care about being a woman in this man's world. She wanted to be a serious painter, and she knew she was, and it just was as simple as that, and was some kind of magic confidence, yet that was pierced and penetrated at all points by different kinds of doubt, fear, anxiety. And her paintings, instead of kind of denaturing that or falsifying it or putting that all at a distance, are right there, just as right there as a Frank O'Hara poem is, about being able to articulate this momentary sensation of feeling of we call it feeling, but I mean, let's face it, like these mixtures of emotions, of sadness, joy, etc., that are kind of bursting on us as these cresting waves, like it's impossible to, as you say, about “Mountains and Sea,” grasp them, right. It's these are these incredibly elusive, but very real, emotional states, which we can all relate to, and she in that sense, in her ability to portray them, she was really like the Shakespeare of the 1950s able to give you some “Midsummer Night's Dream,” as well as some, “Macbeth.” She could do all of that, she had it at her fingertips, and it's in that sense, she was really like a perfect storm of an artist. She had a lot of things going for her. Yeah.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Yeah, truly remarkable. Talk a little bit about, [clears throat], excuse me, about her relationships. I mean, she was a very committed friend, lover, associate of, I mean, Frank O'Hara was a good friend, not initially, I guess, they had some sparks that flew, but then he became a very, very important figure in her life. Clem Greenberg, of course, Grace Hartigan.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah. Yeah, I mean, going back, connecting this to your point about how courageous Helen had to be. Yeah, I mean the older artists, the Irascibles, so-called, were supporters, in a way, and also inspirations. I mean, Pollock, Greenberg showing Helen Pollock strip paintings, that was probably the transformative moment for Helen that took her out of painting kind of imitation Picasso's, which she had been doing at an accomplished level as an undergrad, to then her paintings like “Mountains and Sea,” and so on. Pollock set her free in that way, but they were also intimidating. And the book talks about Barnett Newman, a letter that Barnett Newman sent her, which is pretty chilling. I won't say, I won't describe it, but I did make the decision to quote it in full because it's like, wow, can you imagine getting a letter like that, and as a young person, but she had a day of despair, and then she's on to the next thing. But then there's the people her own age. You mentioned Grace Hartigan, for example, and they were all at the kind of up and coming gallery, Tibor de Nagy, on East 53rd. They were supporters of one another, rivals, like positive rivals, like bidding oneself to outdo outdoing your friend, etc., but they were also ready to stab each other in the back. And Grace Hartigan and Helen were basically friends, but they're also kind of frenemies. And Greenberg really disliked Hartigan's paintings, and since Helen had this five-year relationship with Greenberg, who was 20 years her elder, and who was, of course, the influential and totally brilliant art critic in New York then, that meant that relationship between Grace and Helen cooled for as long as the relationship with Greenberg continued, but they were all very competitive, and you had to have a lot of courage to deal with that. And the competition wasn't about sales, money, because at that time, in the early '50s, really no one was selling work. The only people basically who bought anything of Helen's were like these weirdly out of place, dapper, older men who would come into the gallery and kind of buy a small work, and then it would turn out that they're a friend of Helen's late father, and they were just kind of doing a favor to the late judge. He was a New York State Supreme Court judge. So the rivalry wasn't about sales, that came later in the '50s, it was about just whether you were making a good painting or not. And I'll just, the book talks about how Grace Hartigan, in the privacy of her diary, just saying, “Wow, 'Mountains and Sea,' that's just terrible, awful,” you know, “I thought Helen had taught talent,” you know? So we could talk about that, but Helen, that's such a light painting, as you say, I mean light in a complimentary way. It's like trying to portray that butterfly I spoke of, like on a vast scale, not literally, but the sense of life on the wing. And Grace was sitting there attacking a canvas that year, called “Massacre,” which is this very dark, really roiling mass of impasto, and chiaroscuro that she was working on and coffee-driven cycles of exhilaration and despair. That, for her, was painting “Mountains at Sea,” it was like, what is Helen even doing? And then Joan Mitchell, the other woman who is often associated with Helen, just openly hated Helen and called her, “That Kotex painter,” in reference to Helen's staining techniques. So you had to be tough as nails to do this. And yet, Helen's paintings are joyous. I think that's the thing I love about them, and continue to learn from, among other things, learn about from them.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well at that point, there wasn't any sort of ground plane of what a good painting was.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Mhm.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Because each of them were working individually. I mean, one of the things that I mentioned is that in it for the Renaissance artists who are doing primarily, well, sometimes allegories, but primarily Christian imagery. They could experiment, they could push the edges, they could do something entirely new, but they're still working within kind of a shared value system that basically touched the world in which they lived, both their patrons, but also the people who came to enjoy their pictures. But for these guys working in, well, a few of them the very late '40s, but really the '50s there wasn't that shared sort of ground plane. I mean, Edward Hopper was, he was selling out every show that he had, everything he could paint, even though he painted fairly slowly, it all went away as soon as it was shown. And that certainly wasn't true. I mean, I love the notion that I read in some book, that in, I don't know, 1957 or something, Hans Hofmann was finally able to give up teaching and paint full time. The footnote to that is that he was almost 80 years old, he should have been able to stop painting, or to stop teaching, to (? stop 27:59) living, and be able to do the thing that he had cared about for his entire life. So it's a very challenging, it's a very challenging environment to enter, declare that you're a painter, and not just a painter, but a good painter. And fortunately, you have a friend who is an art critic who is very supportive.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah. Helen's enemies were quick to point out that her alliance with Greenberg, to them, was totally strategic, and had to do with vaulting her up. It hardly mattered that Greenberg, as a matter of principle, made sure to never write about her work, that hardly mattered, but her critics were simplistic. Even as, I think it's fairly obvious that Helen meeting Greenberg, having that relationship, which it consumes a lot of the first half of the book and is quite, let's just say tempestuous. If you link that then with what happens later, which is Helen meets Robert Motherwell, who's also an older man, 13 years older than her, and then they get married, like it's fairly clear, I think that Helen did have some sense of strategic consolidation and ambition for her place in the art world. But to say that that's all that those two relationships were, is completely simplistic; it was they were both much more complicated than that. Greenberg and her, Greenberg really helped her in a million ways to kind of come into her own as an artist, and I think Motherwell was a real love of Helen's.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Yeah. That's, I mean, in some ways, her love life seems fairly tragic. I mean, she has this, what, after only knowing him for four or five months, she marries Motherwell, and it's like a dream come true, the love of her life, but that whole relationship then falls apart. He suffers from some of the same demons that she did, but in a much more serious way.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what brought them together. I think their philosophy of life was formed in childhood and adolescence was similar. And, of course, writing about these kinds of things in a way that isn't, at least one hopes, isn't prying or anything, but is caring, let's say, is what I was going to say, is it's a challenge, of course it's a challenge, but it's also a beautiful thing, I think. It was a beautiful thing for me as a writer to think about these people as having these very complicated, emotional lives, in a way that's just fully human as opposed to being a basis for some kind of judgment by me or anyone else, you know? So, yes, the relationship was tragic, if you like, it was also joy, as it created a lot of intense bonds, intense bonds, for example, between Helen and Robert Motherwell's two young daughters. So just writing the book helped me to think a little bit about life itself, you know?
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Yeah, I was struck reading the acknowledgments about how much time you spent and how many people who were close to Helen that you talked with. I mean, there are, but you went through Clem Greenberg's diaries, you went through her friend, Sonya Rudikoff. Helen wrote, I thought, very, really kind of soul-searching letters. This woman who was a close college friend, and they stayed friends for years, sort of pouring out her soul, her thoughts, her frustrations some of it was frustration of the moment, but sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes they were the kind of fears that shaped the way she made her way through days and weeks and she (? understands 32:55) those because she actually was willing not to hold them in, but to share them with somebody that you knew cared for her very deeply.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, I mean, those letters, which are at Princeton, that's the first place I went. I started researching on the book in 2017, when I was, had the good fortune to be living in my favorite city in the United States, Washington, DC, for six weeks, when I was giving the Mellon Lectures, and so I took advantage of that to go up to Princeton, where those letters are, and begin the research for this. And that was, they're just like you're saying, they're revelatory in the way that a letter can be to a best friend. And indeed, many of the dates in the book are predicated on those letters, for example, August 2, 1955, there's Helen in the Hamptons, and she's house sitting at the Marca-Relli's place, which is just near the Pollock residence, this is a year to the month before Pollock was killed on that same stretch of road. And just okay, she's writing to Sonya from there, and then this is, she's just broken up with Greenberg, I'm going for it. I didn't you know, there's so many things that don't get in the book. And one of the really cool things is I went with Helen's nephew, Clifford Ross, to that house. And it was amazing because you just walk around the yard and kind of peer in the windows and see the outbuilding that was Helen's studio, and you just think, oh man, I got to work this in somehow, and I never really did, but it was still a great experience. You know, wow, this is where she stayed for this month when she was trying to avoid Greenberg, because he was really not taking no for an answer. He did not want them to break up, and they had a very extended not-break-up for most of that year, really. Anyway, just an aside there, about all that gets left out of the book.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) I know, maybe you should do, what, an appendix, who that is.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) (Unintelligible) Some of the original material that you read through because it's, you know, we went through a phase in art history where it was totally taboo to say anything biographical about an artist. It was pure form, pure object, and the fact that guy had orange juice in the morning for breakfast really had nothing to do with anything.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah. Oh, it's so true. And in my version of that in the 1980s, in graduate school at Yale, like the whole idea of the individual, the self, presence, experience, directness, was all under question. And as you know from having encountered my earlier self, I was quite ready to speak that line. And it's more than a line, it's actually very powerful kind of account of things that is a worthy corrective to our sometimes too simple equation between an artist and a work, or something like that, right? So the formalism of one time is sort of similar to the so-called theory of another time of art history, both are hostile to biography, right? And I think the thing that one thing I learned from writing this book, Virginia, is that biography is hard. It's much harder than writing scholarship. I can just tell you. If I'm going to say that Helen had a glass of orange juice, it might take me all day to write that sentence, you know, because why? I don't know. But you've got a person's life in their hand, in your hands a little bit, and you don't want to mess it up, really. So that's something I learned to become, I think, a little more humble about, about that.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) You're also dealing with complexities, rather than providing answers, that are, make people feel like that they understand something. But what you're doing is you're making them look at the prism from a lot of different facets, and (unintelligible) no matter which angle you're looking from, you're going to see something that's different, adjacent.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) No, you're so right. And yet, that's not like just merely subjective, right? It's actually commensurate with a wiser position. So yeah, scholarship is supposed to have right answers. It's supposed to argue against people who don't think as you do. And in that sense, I've always been miscast as an academic. You know, I've done my share of arguing, but it's always a little half-hearted. And now as I get a little older and wiser, I just realized that I don't have to be right, I just have to tell a compelling story. In fact, I've already trotted out that answer in my van Gogh class, because this is Silicon Valley; people want there to be correct answers that are progressive minded and all this stuff. And like so one version of mansplaining, whether it's in Silicon Valley or anywhere, is how do you know that? I get that a lot, usually from men older than myself, white men usually. And it's always a little disappointing because it's basically to say, the world is disenchanted. It's just a matter of answers. I'm sitting in this auditorium, or on the Zoom call with you, only because I want to have some right answers. The whole idea of thinking together, opening a space for reflection. In other words, one might say, a state of being instead of simply existing, is absent. It's just absent. So Helen, who rejected different career choices working for “Time Life Magazine,” et cetera, she committed everything to this idea that life is about thought, experience, sensation, not answers. So again, something I say a lot is, to my students, for example, don't write about art, write with art with the fantasy of the artist; inhabit the fantasy of the artist and share it, try to articulate it. Don't write about art as though it and you are tools.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) You're not going to find it very many answers in art. It sounds to me, though, Alex, that you are, finally, maybe liberated, intellectually and emotionally liberated in the way that Helen was when she first saw --
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Exactly, no, it's so true.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) All of a sudden, there are no rules that you must
obey or that have to provide a framework for the way you must think.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, and I think it's a little bit, to me, ironic, because the book opens, in the intro it talks about Helen, who Helen was in the 1980s, when she was in her 50s, when she was the age I am now, and I was the age that she was when I, in the time I wrote the book, right? And so, when Helen was my age, she had kind of turned fairly brittle and fixed in what everything was, what her own work was, everything, whereas, me at her age, now, I'm kind of opening up as you say, I think that's right. But when she was in her 20s, she was wild on the canvas, free, unafraid, exploratory, philosophical, emotional, and I was the arguer, the this is that, that is this, so that's what I mean by irony.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) I want to read you something which you, of course, remember, but at various points in the book, you talk about Helen's gift, and that's what you call it, her gift. And you described it as, this is a quote, “Taking what was happening around her, and inside of her, and bringing it out, and sudden momentary pulsations of color, shape and line,” and you said that the result of this was, “Printings that are surprising, and as glorious as life itself,” which I thought was absolutely reflected the way I feel when I look, not at every Helen Frankenthaler painting, certainly, but at many of them. You kind of exit your sense of self and inhabit this other realm that you didn't hear until you happened upon (unintelligible) color painting. It makes a different world for you.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, and just as you say, Virginia, it's your world, not hers, too, in the sense that, I think a fairly a person might say, “Well, why should I care about this woman's feelings, that is Helen Frankenthaler's feelings?” I don't care about her feelings, you know? This isn't a TED Talk; I don't want to know about your life in nine minutes. Like, who cares, you know? Right, something like that. And what is actually true, as I think your reflection shows, is that Helen used her own feelings, what happened to her that day, what happened to her when she was 11, her hopes or fears, as you say, as a medium, not as the message, as the medium for the articulation of something that could be true for other people. And so when you're able to respond to these works in that way, and I am, and I think others are, we're basically receiving the gift of that which we already are, but which we require art to remind us we possess.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well, before we run out of time, Alex, talk to us about what's next on your plate. I want to hear what I'm looking forward to.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yes, thank you. I mentioned the Mellon Lectures in 2017 that I gave, and ordinarily, I would have just written that as my next book, but this Frankenthaler book intervened. So those lectures are called “The Forest: America in the 1830s.” And I've just finished writing that book, it's now called “The Forest,” there's just a very slight change, “The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s.” So it's a book that takes the storytelling mode that I learned in the Frankenthaler book and just tell stories about the 1830s in the Americas, or in the United States, focusing on figures we might well expect, Andrew Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nat Turner, many people, it's told in these five-page vignettes, but it's a fable, Virginia, kind of touching on art history, in the sense that a lot of it is made up, where it's not entirely clear what is true and what's not true, but my aim is to portray what it was like then to be alive, and to not write a kind of dry, impoverished, narrative based on dusty manuscripts, though, I have done my equivalent of looking at those things and thinking very hard about that period, but to tell stories, and to feel that that's an overlooked medium of historical inquiry.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) I love the word fable, because that, on one hand, is everybody's perception of their own lives, or a moment (unintelligible) in their own lives. And it's also partly what we do is we find information and we translate it into some sort of a story very often, a fable.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) So that there is meaning that it gets to somebody else, so that they see something, or understand or feel something that they didn't, they hadn't grasped before?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Now I am, let me see if I can get this moved up here. We have a few questions. If anybody has a question, please put it into the Q&A, so that we don't miss you. Someone has asked if you would give an example of a day in Frankenthaler's life and what it said about her work and development. So you addressed this some, but --
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, so the day -- I mean, yeah, thank you. I think, for example, the day in 1953, July 27th, she's in Madrid and she's going to the Prado. And the chapter says why would she spend days in this dark museum looking at old master paintings? And that chapter is about not only the guts it took for Helen to go to Madrid all alone, she traveled all alone there, and the country was just newly opened up to American tourism, because Franco was wanting to create a kind of anti-communist connection between dictatorship and democracy, right. So Helen was all over that, like I am going to Spain, I want to go to see paintings in the Prado. So in terms of our development, wow, to see all of these great paintings by Titian and Rubens and Velazquez and so on, in person, was decisive for her. So that's one answer.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Thank you. I'm going to sort of skip around here in the questions. But here's one that I think we probably all would like to hear what you have to say. And that is, what surprised you about Helen in your research?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yes. I hope you won't think it's glib if I say, in a way, nothing. And what I mean by that is not that I knew anything about Helen going in, because I really didn't, but that my intuition in wanting to write about her was confirmed at every point. In other words, in the broad contours, I saw someone who could find a joy and a lightness and talk about the seriousness of lightness, and who could do so only by virtue of having experienced certain kinds of ongoing dark nights of the soul. So, in that sense, I learned nothing surprising about Helen. She was who I intuited her to be. It's sort of like Helen would say looking at a painting she disputed with how with Sonya Rudikoff, who was much more political and intellectual than she was. Like Helen said, “No painting is good intellectually. Like it's just like, kabam, it's a charge, you like it, you don't just like that, fantastic, terrific.” And I think that's similar kind of lightning intuition of like, this is what it is, I think characterized my own perception of her. I think, sure there are all kinds of details where you just kind of have to like look twice in the letters, like did I just read that? I mean, it's crazy, right? Greenberg's diaries, just like I had to go back to Los Angeles, did I really see that? I think I have to fly back down to Los Angeles just to make sure that I really saw that written down. I know I have a photograph of it, but I want to see, again, with my own eyes that kind of thing. So of course, a million little surprises, but big picture, no surprise.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well, how about this? Do you think that Frankenthaler's Jewish background, working right after the end of World War II, shows up in your work?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Such a good question. There's a painting by her, which you can probably picture, Virginia, called “Holocaust,” from 1955, which is not in the book. Helen really hotly disputed that that painting, for example, had anything to do with the Holocaust, just as she hotly disputed that her painting was feminist in any way. And she rightly pointed out that she always gave her paintings titles after they were made, not before, because their paintings are never about anything. But in a broader sense, I think, yes, I think there's probably a way that her work is engaged with being Jewish at that moment. That would be a great topic for someone to take up, for sure.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) And so we have another question from our good friend, Frank Goodyear, who is asking if you would talk a little bit about her artistic process. What did she do when she started her workday in the morning?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, well with “Mountains and Sea,” she started her workday in the afternoon, kind of moaning and groaning like not wanting to be there, like dragging herself by force of will. Of course, there were a lot of reasons why the studio was both a saving place and yet another burden, I suppose, in her life at that point. But Frank, she just decided on that day, maybe out of laziness, she said to just not prime the canvas, just put it on the floor, use thinned paint, thinned oil paint, drew a kind of surrealist like armature of motifs as a beginning move, kind of biomorphic shapes in charcoal, and worked on it for several hours and then finished. And she said, “The light gesture is the strongest of all.” And yet, to go back to our point about courage, that was something that really rankled people that this painting isn't even finished. But, for me, that light gesture means bringing a painting just to the moment when it becomes a painting and then leaving it right there, not overdoing it, not killing it, basically. Right? And then having the guts to just say that's my painting. And it's true, no one really got it, but it didn't matter to Helen, although she went into quite a depression when her show went up in 1953, lots of sleeping for hours. that kind of thing. I talked about her identifying with the neurotic ballerina, played by the beautiful Claire Bloom in the 1952 movie “Limelight” just at that time, which she, Helen, saw, just there was a lot of depression but no doubt about her process and what she was trying to get with that process.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Okay, I think we have time for a couple of more questions. One is sort of a comment/question. Couldn't Frankenthaler's images keynoting light and joy be not an expression of those emotions, but a desire to experience them as in the Winnicottian idea of the transitional object rehearsing future experience?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah. Wow, that's a great question. I don't, I mean, my impression is that there's nothing aspirational about Helen's work, that it's all in the present moment, but rather than oppose a sort of future desire to present actuality I might say that present actuality itself is, if you like, composed partly of aspirations. We seek that which we have. We desire what we're blindly touching at that very moment.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) I just figured out how to scroll down in the Q&A, so apologies to those whose questions hadn't shown up before. One question is, what was the average scale of her work? Generally, how big are her pictures? And how did she manage to do them?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, well, “Mountains and Sea” is about 10x7; that's a good sample size. There are photographs in the book of her approaching walking on top of them, as you might imagine, using kind of booties or slippers so as not to sully the surface. Also, as on the cover of Mary Gabriel's great book, “Ninth Street Women,” she you can Helen on her knees working on the canvas. So it's a very physical process, very inward. I would say it's both inward and physical, this constant assessment of how is the painting taking shape, and how is it happening in concert with the actions of my body, etc.?
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Here is an interesting thought. I'm listening to the audible book. The reader creates a persona when she speaks in Helen's voice, it makes her sound droll and unpleasant. I wouldn't get that impression if I were reading the book. Are you okay with that?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Wow, I haven't listened to the book yet. They sent it to me, but I haven't. I suppose it's the interpreter's prerogative to interpret how Helen should come across. So but I appreciate the subtlety of the response because it does suggest that, yes, the book is a different thing from the audiobook. But yeah, am I okay with that? I guess it's not my choice, it's that person's art form.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Okay, I'm going to give you two or three things all at the same time and then you can answer the -- first of all, what did your father think about Helen's possibility, her future possibilities as an artist? Do you have an amusing story about Helen to share? Can you speak more about the competition among the female artists working in New York in the 1950s? You mentioned several of them, but there were certainly a number of others who were --
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Was that about competition, did you say, that last one?
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Yes.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah. So well, first of all, my dad died in 1991, actually, during the West as America exhibition, or just after it, just at the end of it, maybe the same day, it ended, in fact, July 5, 1991, that same weekend. So I was 27 then, but by that time, Helen was quite an established painter. I think they were both members, by that point, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. So he didn't need to wonder if she was going to make it or anything. She was quite famous. As far as amusing stories, yes, I suppose I do have a few of Helen. She had a great sense of humor. I think a little bit of it, some of it's kind of off color, I suppose, but she was funny. That smile that you see in the photograph of her at the ball that you mentioned, the dress up ball, is really indicative of Helen's laughter, her smile, etc. The last point is about women who are artists then and others besides the one I mentioned. I'll give you a very vivid example. I don't know if you know this artist, Virginia, she comes up very minutely in the book, but she is kind of one another one of these people I would have loved to talk more about, but just didn't have the chance. Alice Baber?
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) We actually own a painting by Alice Baber at the --
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Great. Yeah, wonderful. So, you like it? Yeah. You like the painting?
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) You know, sort of. I don’t know if I like it or not. I know what it looks like. I don’t know what it says to me.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Yeah, right. Well, I like I've liked very much that you're able to say you don't know if you like it that judgment is kind of in too short supply these days, I think, about any artists. But anyway, I took a liking to Alice Baber, because in 1956, Helen started dating this guy, Herb Gould, who is one of the people I actually interviewed for the book. (Unintelligible) I interviewed, the other being Alfred Leslie. And Herb was just telling me about what it was like to date Helen, but he didn't like Helen, as he says, “Our souls did not meet.” He thought her art was kind of suspect. And Herb Gold, who was a novelist friend of Saul Bellow, he started dating Alice Baber right after Helen. And he basically said to me, “Hey, Alice Baber was great, and we got along so well. And she lived completely modestly in this little muse down in Greenwich Village no fuss, nothing.” It was the opposite of Helen, who was having dinner parties to promote her career and things like that. And Herb Gold was just saying Alice Baber, he liked her so much because she was so unpretentious. And the thing I say in the book is Alice Baber is unknown today, and you can draw your own conclusions about that.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well, Alex, we're just about out of time. Is there anything that you want to tell everybody that hasn't come up in our conversation so far, something that is aching to be known by more?
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Well, thank you for that. No, I mean, I'm sure there are, but I just I'm so grateful for -- I'm sure there are things I could say, but I'm just grateful to everyone for coming. I'm grateful to you, Virginia, for asking such probing questions, and indeed to the audience for giving me a chance to reflect on the book. And it's really meaningful for me to be back in a SAAM context. So thank you, again. Thank you to Kaylee and Carlos, and everyone for also all the behind the scenes work in organizing this event.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg) Well, thank you. It's been a fascinating. I mean, I wish we were sitting here with a glass of wine so we could just keep on talking, but that's not in the cards for tonight. So we'll look forward to our next adventure, which may be a fable.
— (Dr. Alexander Nemerov) Indeed. Yeah. Thank you so much again. Okay.
— (Virginia Mecklenburg ) Thanks, everyone, for coming. It's been a pleasure to have you here. Goodnight.
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