KAREN WILKIN
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painting seems freshly conceived and intuitively produced. Her re–
cent works ranged from a superheated crimson canvas, like an echo–
ing chord, to a tumble of springtime pale shapes, like an updated
version of her celebrated
Mountains and Sea
of 1952, to a looming
near-black picture with staccato touches of color that managed to be
both serious and playful. Frankenthaler can load a canvas to the
limit or pare it down to a skeleton. She can be dramatic, somber,
witty and yes, lyrical. And she remains a splendid colorist. In
The
Widow of Fantin-La Tour,
for example, she played frothy pale mauves
and murky grey-greens against a velvety brown expanse and then
subverted this subtle harmony with an audacious hit of acid
green.
Frankenthaler often speaks of the importance of her early
grounding in Cubism; she feels that the spatial flux of Cubist planes
is at the heart of her work.
It
is more apparent than ever, in her new
paintings, that her ravishing-or abrasive-color, her drawing, her
floods and clots of pigment establish zones of space as much as they
tug at one another across the canvas. The saturated, relatively
uninflected sheets of color that serve as "backgrounds" in her recent
work put this kind of space-making at risk. A single color, if too
dominant, can flatten the entire picture. As a result, touch counts as
much as color or placement; nuances of surface can "make" a picture
or throw it off.
It
was exhilarating to see Frankenthaler taking these
risks, in her pursuit of expressiveness and of what she calls "the
wrong thing that makes it all right." Watching her successful passage
along this high wire is part of the pleasure of her best new work.
Darby Bannard and Darryl Hughto'sJanuary exhibits offered
opportunities to see how the tradition of Olitski and Frankenthaler
has fared lately. Bannard, a contemporary of Frank Stella's, is
known as much for his straightforward, insightful criticism as he is
for his paintings, but he has always been primarily a practitioner,
not a theoretician. He was a recipient of a Greenburger Award for
painting in 1986. Bannard obviously trusts the expressive possibil–
ities of process - the making of each picture is always revealed in his
work - and his intelligence, his grasp of theory is always manifest.
But good as individual paintings have been all along, a series could
look dangerously like systematic exploration of a set problem. When
Bannard let his intuition loose, his pictures were the better for it:
quirkier, more personable and more energetic.
The paintings in his show at Greenberg-Wilson were among
his most intuitive to date and among his more spontaneous, relaxed
