KAREN WILKIN
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about all of collage's best known practitioners-Picasso, Matisse,
Juan Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, Robert Motherwell, and
Helen Frankenthaler. (That Braque was absent was surprising, given
the magnificent exhibition of his collages organized by Carmean when
he was a curator at the National Gallery.) Artists less obviously associ–
ated with the medium, such as Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock,
were also well represented; Hofmann's bold black-and-white brush
drawing, its space transformed by the imposition of a sheet of paper
with vigorous colored marks, and Pollock's little diptych of silvery
poured canvases, one panel punctuated by a crushed paint tube, were
among the most engaging works in the show.
Pasted Papers
posed questions about the roles of chance and choice,
accident and will.
It
examined the differences between using collaged
materials to refer to something other than themselves and as tangible
substitutes for more insubstantial media or as anything in between.
Along the way, it also explored the history of collage, most succinctly,
perhaps, in the witty pairing of a textbook Picasso, complete with a cut–
and-pasted wineglass and a drawn pipe, with a Jasper Johns incorpo–
rating a cut-out portrait of Picasso among (and as) wineglass images.
Three energetic Frankenthalers, spanning almost all of her career, were
outstanding, the Motherwells and S.chwitterses were a delight, and the
Ad Reinhardt, testimony to his understanding of color's structural prop–
erties.
It
was an exhibition any museum would have been proud of.
Frankenthaler's collages were given a context by a survey of her paint–
ings from private collections, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, at
Ameringer Howard. The pleasure of seeing a good selection of vintage
Frankenthalers was enhanced by the unfamiliarity of many of the works
on view and by their being, on the whole, at the tough rather than the lyri–
cal end of her spectrum. (Which is not to say that they weren't beautiful.)
Among the most memorable: a large plummy painting that seemed to
pulse between heat and dusky non-color, its vertical and horizontal axes
asserted by emphatic drawing and a vigorous swoop of thick pigment; a
big citrus-green picture with a shifting mass of declarative brown, purple–
brown, and dull green strokes, like a dissected landscape reconstituted in
pure painting terms; a radiant peach-orange-gold vertical canvas with a
strangely uncomfortable but absolutely essential floating rectangle of
duller gold, one of those inexplicable and necessary moves that Franken–
thaler characterizes as "the wrong thing that makes it right." As always,
the pictures depended not only on the artist's obvious gifts as a colorist,
but also on her sensitivity to subtle relationships of the size and propor–
tion of painting incidents to the size and proportion of the canvas. As
