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PARTISAN REVIEW
mystery, but also unsettling the viewer and providing an antidote to the
pictures' fragility and lyricism. The largest works, many with warm,
earth-toned grounds, like weathered stucco wails, also have architectural
associations. (Good as the large works in the show were, a series of
small, intensely colored pictures was equally impressive and ambitious.)
For some time, MacPhee has been a painter to take seriously. Her newest
work seems to me even more inventive and more haunting than what
preceded it, and that's saying a good deal.
Helen Frankenthaler's show of recent work at Knoedler and
Company, one of her strongest exhibitions in the last few years, was one
of the season's highlights. Her giant' paintings on paper - over six feet
square on average - were like summings up of her most persistent con–
cerns, translated into completely fresh, unpredictable terms. Part of the
pictures' impact admittedly came from their complete dismantling of our
assumptions about the nature of works on paper - that they are fragile,
informal, and intimate, for starters - and that they have a lot to do with
line; l:>ut here are
paintings
on the scale of the most ambitious canvases
imaginable, on paper as robust as a plaster wall. Yet they are also very
much about the character of their materials: about the way paint soaks
into paper and slides along its surface, the way transparent color becomes
radiant against a white sheet, the way a rapid line plays against a ragged,
hand-cast edge.
Of course, for many years, Frankenthaler has made works on paper
with the same enthusiasm and seriousness she has given to her canvases,
but rarely on this scale. Her new paperworks are both typical of her and
surprising.
In
some, you recognize with pleasure her familiar expressive
"handwriting" - fluent, large-sc;ile drawing and pools of pigment - but
there are other notable, atypical works constructed with solid blocks of
color or roughly brushed scumbles. As always, half-glimpsed allusions,
never literal, always fleeting, emerge and then disappear - a suggestion of
landscape space or of an interior, for example . As always, too, each
image seems at once the result of the paint's determining its own fate
and of having been manipulated by a particular, strong-minded
individual. Exuberant, gutsy, tough, and very beautiful, they are
memorable pictures.
What about the other half - the exhibitions by male artists? Shows
of new work by John Gibson and Michael Mulhern, at Perspective Fine
Arts and Rosenberg and Kaufman Gallery, respectively, offered opportu–
nities to stay up to date on the evolution of two thoughtful painters
whose work is worth following. For several years, Mulhern has tested
the limits of painting-as-object against painting-as-metaphor in dense lit
