Helen Frankenthaler Captivates at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

In the Radical Beauty show, her ethereal, experimental work wins new fans.

L ast week I wrote about the Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s a wonderful place, and I had a great time. My only quibble was its permanent-collection interpretation, which seemed to have been taken over by staff focused on childhood education. Now, I‘m acculturated to the old ways of American and English museums. In my distant youth, didactic labels in the permanent-collection galleries just weren’t done, aside from the name of the artist, the title, and a line crediting the donor, if it was a gift. Visitors were empowered to take what they could from an object, based on their intelligence and their mood. Labels were distractions and, worse, curatorial interventions. A good painting has lots of meanings. A 50-word label can’t help but impose only one.

Didactic labels are common now, and they’re never good. At Dulwich, I can only call them baby talk, with a few that are inanities. It’s best to say nothing. Everyone has a mobile device, anyway. If a visitor wants to learn more about Poussin’s Seven Sacraments, three of which are on view, they’ve got more information at their command than centuries of popes. Or the visitor can let these splendid things speak for themselves.

With a tone that’s not at all scholarly, the Helen Frankenthaler show, Radical Beauty, is an oasis of calm and purpose. The 36 woodcuts on display come from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and span a period from 1973 to Madame Butterfly, from 2000, the print she considered her best.

Returning for a moment to gallery interpretation — though the permanent collection’s is banal, the Frankenthaler show begins with text written by someone with spark:

No rules. Those two words were a guiding mantra for Frankenthaler throughout her 60-year career. There is no better example than in her audacious experiments in woodcut printmaking. A rigid and rudimentary medium, woodcuts seem counterintuitive to creative innovation. Even Frankenthaler was initially a skeptic.

Now, this has bounce. “No rules” entices. So does “audacious.” We’re told of a problem medium facing a notably daring artist. She’s initially doubtful, but she’s daring. We’re promised a success story. It’s a curatorial voice, not a kindergarten teacher’s.

The Dulwich exhibition isn’t trailblazing. I’ve seen at least three good Frankenthaler print shows over the years. Ruth Fine, the print curator at the National Gallery in Washington, did the definitive scholarly book on Frankenthaler prints in the 1990s. The Dulwich exhibition works because it’s new material for English audiences, the art’s stunning, and the process is explained step by step. There’s a story, and it’s about how Frankenthaler made this “rigid and rudimentary medium” work wonders.

When I hear “woodcut,” I think of Dürer, whose 1498 woodcut series The Apocalypse made the medium famous. Dürer, or a specialist carver, gouges the design’s white space on a wood block. The flat, uncarved part of the block holds the ink, and that makes the lines. The look is decidedly linear, with shadow and tone hard to convey. It’s the medium of straightforward storytelling rather than mood-making. Dürer’s woodcuts were revolutionary illustrations augmenting biblical text. Engraving and etching, coming a bit later, are media made for nuance, interiority, and fluid motion. Woodcuts invited powerful, direct narrative. As printmaking developed, the woodcut waned.

Frankenthaler took on this old medium because it seemed to combine painting, sculpture, and printmaking. This is why her woodcuts are so stunning. I’ve seen a million woodcuts but never work of this complexity. Essence Mulberry, from 1977, starts with a sheet of wood. Frankenthaler uses the grain as part of the design. She invented a technique she called “guzzying.” She used a range of tools from sandpaper, graters, dentist tools, and a cheese scraper to create a wood surface whose grain is soft. This becomes part of the design. And Frankenthaler used not one wood but four. She used oak veneer, birch, walnut, and lauan wood for different parts of the design. Frankenthaler often used a jigsaw to cut shapes that were printed separately. These pieces had to be seamlessly connected in the printing process, so shapes flowed, with no unwanted gaps.

Displayed side by side are seven working proofs for Essence Mulberry. She needed 65 to get the colors and texture as she wanted them. For the final version, eight wood blocks, or sheets, were needed, one for each color. Frankenthaler also exquisitely manipulated, or sculpted, wood, but she also used special, handmade paper. In Freefall, from 1993, she applied paper pulp directly to paper using brushes, combs, and a turkey baster to create texture.

The Radical Beauty show is a class in art-making teamwork, too. Frankenthaler is known, correctly, as a painter. Painting is a solitary enterprise. Printmaking sometimes is, too, if the artist is, say, an etcher and owns a press. He or she uses tools in making designs, picks inks and paper, and prints a hundred or so impressions. Woodcuts of this complexity, though, required collaboration. There’s nothing wrong with this. Over the past 50 years or so, an artist like Frankenthaler will have a radical idea that simple techniques and tools like a burin and a little press won’t realize. We live in a highly technological age.

Frankenthaler sometimes worked with master carvers, often in Japan, to get the wood surfaces she wanted. A printer such as Ken Tyler, who owned Tyler Graphics, had special hydraulic presses. Japan has its own history of woodcut prints having nothing to do with traditions started by Dürer. Weeping Crabapple, from 2009, Frankenthaler’s last woodcut, was a collaboration between the artist and the master Japanese printer Yasuyuki Shibata. Dark, wispy lines and geometric patterns in pastel colors are the stuff of magic. It’s a three-color woodcut, a block for each color. As much as Frankenthaler merges painting, sculpture, and the printing press, here she melds representation and abstraction.

The exhibition ends with Madame Butterfly. Frankenthaler picked the title to suggest her art’s Eastern and Western look, and I think she made a mistake in grafting Puccini’s story of heartbreak, death, birth, and remorse onto what is an ambiguous work of art. The title is too directive. The object seems to float on a surface that has some transparency so we can perceive depth, but it also seems to reflect the sky. It’s got 102 tones of color. Frankenthaler’s soak-and-stain painting technique achieved dreamy, limpid colors. Her manipulation of different blocks to achieve color tone made for a palette all its own. For another layer of complexity, it’s a triptych with three different handmade papers.

I would have ditched the comparison, in another part of the museum, between a Monet painting from the Musée Marmottan in Paris and a Frankenthaler painting lent by her foundation. The Monet, Water Lilies and Agapanthus, is a crappy one. It’s from 1914–17. Monet wasn’t past his prime but had off moments, one result of which was this picture.

I bought the small, intricately designed catalogue. It’s a good read, with a mix of interview-style quotes from Frankenthaler, a look at the history of the woodcut, nice illustrations, and foldouts that compare different proofs.

I had a great time. The permanent-collection interpretation didn’t annoy me too much since it’s so low on content. The art’s fantastic. The Frankenthaler exhibition is an ethereal delight.

The exhibition extends Dulwich’s history of hosting unusual exhibitions. When I first visited, in the mid ’80s, I saw an exhibition on Gainsborough’s portraits of the Linley family of musical prodigies and stage performers. It was lovely and entirely topical for the museum since it owns a great double portrait of two Linley sisters. The Clark Art Institute, where I would later work as a curator, loaned its own double portrait of Elizabeth and Thomas Linley. I’d call it a well-done, traditional show, developing a picture in the permanent collection and sticking to an Old Master subject.

Starting around 2000, Dulwich did much more adventurous work. It organized a big Winslow Homer show, Britain’s first. It was smashing. Homer is the most American of painters but drew from the English seascape tradition. A few years later, Dulwich hosted one of my exhibitions, a survey of American art from the Hudson River School to Frank Stella, all drawn from the Addison Gallery, where I was the director. It was the first survey show of American art in Britain. The English critics assumed that American art was a pasty derivative of European art, but our great Eakinses, Hoppers, and Ash Can things were, as they learned, distinctive and very good.

Dulwich always had talented and adventurous curators and directors. Ian Dejardin, a Dutch Old Master specialist who was the curator and then director, launched project after project, all of great quality. His predecessor, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, handled the museum’s expansion before his years as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, the director of the Queen’s art collection. Xavier Bray, now the director of the Wallace Collection, started as the curator at Dulwich, as did Xavier Salomon, now the Frick’s chief curator. It’s clear that Dulwich is an incubator of great talent.

Jennifer Scott is the director now. She’d been director of the lovely Holburne Museum in Bath and is an Old Masters scholar. Dulwich, as a privately funded and run museum, took a big hit during the Chinese coronavirus lockdowns.  The museum’s endowment is about £30 million, but it depends heavily on admissions income. Unlike most British museums, it’s not government-owned.  She’s been heroic in keeping the place afloat. She wants to build visitorship in Lambeth, Lewisham, and Southwark, close to prosperous Dulwich but an entirely different economic demographic.  It’s a nice thought.

Over the years, the museum did a Norman Rockwell show, a Wyeth retrospective, and landmark shows on Norwegian art and even Canadian art, all new topics. At the time, no one knew anything about Norwegian art. Dulwich did a show on Nicolai Astrup, the Norwegian Symbolist, long before the Clark tackled it in a retrospective I reviewed. It’s not American chauvinism for me to say Canadian art is short on zip but, alas, it is. Dulwich presented the Group of Seven as artists of merit, though as artists who fascinate, well, we don’t live in an age known for miracles.

Radical Beauty, Frankenthaler’s show, isn’t the most original exhibition, but I think English audiences are learning a lot from it and, of course, about her. In the spring, it’s hosting Reframed: The Woman in the Window, a show that will gather work from Rembrandt to Cindy Sherman on the motif of depicting women in windows. It is about gender and visibility and sounds like a recipe for fashionable incoherence. After that is their exhibition of work by M. K. Ciurlionis (1875–1911), a Lithuanian composer and painter. I had never heard of him, but his art looks very dreamy indeed and a positive revelation.