464
PARTISAN REVIEW
times sensuous, sometimes challenging work to speak for itself She has,
deservedly, been regarded since the 1950s as an artist to be reckoned
with
by anyone with a serious interest in twentieth-century painting, but the
current fashion among reviewers is to declare their departure from this
view, as if attempting to prove their independence of mind. Their reason–
ing seems to be that Frankenthaler can't be as good as everyone has said
she is because she hasn't been victimized or "marginalized." (See the bi–
ographies of Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Louise
Bourgeois,
et al.)
A Washington journalist, Paul Richard, who revealed
both a remarkable inability to see art and a stunning ignorance of print–
making, suggested that Frankenthaler has been admired only because of
her relationship to important male figures in the art world. The only in–
teresting question raised by his article is why
The Washington Post
would
publish an uninformed personal attack under the heading of responsible
criticism.
Joan Mitchell, who died last fall at the age of sixty-seven, was, on the
other hand, roundly praised. The biographical data is right, of course,
what with her unhappy alliance with the Canadian painter Jean-Paul
Riopelle, and her outsider status in New York, as a resident of France for
many years. But what about the work? As a group, her last paintings were
stronger than those of the past few years, but they sounded the same note,
floated the same arty clusters of strokes, vignette-like, against grounds of
arbitrary dimensions. What's extraordinary is that these pictures were
pronounced resonant and deeply felt, while Frankenthaler's and those of
some of her colleagues have been dismissed as displaying "mere taste."
Mitchell's lyrical, gestural evocation oflandscape is better than a lot of
what's around, but it's still pretty slight; her color is less than astonishing,
the scale of her mark and its rhythm predictable. The large pictures at
Robert Miller seemed bombastic, their size rhetorical, rather than essen–
tial, while the smaller ones looked like Modem Art - I kept thinking of
Mathieu. Mitchell was a good painter - no small achievement - whose
death is to be regretted. Was she an unsung genius, a force who might
have changed the course of American painting, had she not been ex–
cluded from center stage by a male conspiracy, as her fans imply? Hardly.
On the other hand, Elizabeth Catlett's exhibition at June Kelly
Gallery
was
an overdue tribute to the doyenne of African-American
sculptors.
It
was, I believe, her first solo exhibit at aNew York commer–
cial gallery and the first show of her sculpture in New York since 1971,
when it was seen at the Studio Museum in Harlem. (A print retrospective
was at the Jamaica Arts Center in 1989.) The show was accompanied by a
handsome catalogue with a thoughtful, informative essay by Lowery
Stokes Sims.
