More an experiment in art writing than an artist’s biography as conventionally understood, Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin) is notable in part for what it does not cover. Frankenthaler’s childhood and family backstory get notably short shrift, and the majority of her decades-long career is absent entirely. Instead, Nemerov focuses all but exclusively on the ten-year period in which Frankenthaler first established herself as an artist and produced some of her best-known paintings. This era is itself addressed in an episodic, nonlinear fashion. Each chapter takes a single day as its point of departure, though all track backward and forward in time.
Reviewers have taken issue with these authorial choices, at times bemoaning the book’s seeming thinness or incompleteness, its failure to deliver a comprehensive, cradle-to-grave narrative. But what if Nemerov’s approach were, instead, uniquely fitted to its subject? Here, as in many narratives of postwar art, Frankenthaler’s monumental stain painting Mountains and Sea, 1952, is clearly the paradigmatic work. This is most apparent on the level of structure: Nemerov tells us that Frankenthaler’s decision to date the canvas to a single day (October 26) partly inspired his book’s signature conceit. Yet her breakthrough composition might equally appear a model in other ways. Mountains and Sea, Nemerov notes, “stopped far short of what the world considered a ‘finished’ painting.” Eschewing the increasingly hackneyed rhetoric of existential anguish and protracted struggle endemic to the Abstract Expressionist milieu, Frankenthaler’s improvised abstractions aspired to a certain lightness, a feeling of possibility or heightened “aliveness.” Nemerov, too, seems to aim at something like this, both in the considered restriction of his scope and in his lyrical descriptions of specific works. His structure and style are fully of a piece with his argument in favor of the specificity and validity of Frankenthaler’s achievement. The result is an absorbing read—and a compelling invitation to rethink both the limits and the possibilities of an often stodgy genre.
Molly Warnock is the author of Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting (Penn State University Press, 2020).