HELEN FRANKENTHALER
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the catalyst and liaison man - in a way a "producer" for painters and po–
ets. He had a very theatrical £lair and was a prototype of the culture-finder
and mover. Soon after he started his gallery (over an icehouse off Third
Avenue and 53rd Street, near the old EI), I joined it. Larry Rivers, Grace
Hartigan, Robert Goodnough, and Harry Jackson were already there. We
comprised what came to be known as the second-generation New York
school. The gallery grew, and other galleries spread and opened. The
Hansa Gallery, the Stable Ooan Mitchell showed there), et cetera. Toward
the end of the fifties, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland periodically came
to New York from Washington, D.C. They spawned the Washington
School but were also considered part of the New York aesthetic scene.
In both the first and second generations, I was the youngster.
Although I was allied with the Tibor group, I actually related much more
to my original mentors of the first generation, whom I also experienced as
comrades or peers.
HK:
Acaderrucs now talk a lot about the role of the Cold War, and so
on, in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the fifties. Do you have
anything to say about that? Was there a politics to the art scene?
HF:
No. Not at all the way we see politics in the art scene today. Politics
per se, the news of the world at large, were often a passionate concern,
but these considerations were apart from the passionate concerns of art.
Striving to make beautiful new paintings that worked was one issue;
McCarthyism, the Cold War, were something else. When art is really
beautiful and moving, it brings with it not only growing pleasure but also
a sense of truth . This truth, this reality - something so spiritual and un–
nameable, unprovable - is and has always been a political force in itself
Any other kind of political persuasion is usually empty fashion, or danger–
ous, or both.
HK:
Could you say something about the dominant positIOn of the
School of Paris in the fifties. Wasn't that what the "smart money," that is,
fashion, was buying in the fifties?
HF:
The "smart money" in America was still geared
to
buying the
School of Paris in the fifties, but the inner sanctum knew they were "off,"
that the real McCoy was here. That "smart money" was still being wooed
by the cuisine of painting surface, by reputations, and by a kind of en–
trenched non-thinking Francophilia. The collectors also didn't mind
Salon-sized pictures, compared to what seemed to be giant walls of
paintings that the New York School was producing. These same collec–
tors also seemed
to
have Salon-scaled rrunds and eyes. The European art
