WILLIAM DAVIE

“I really had to be convinced to enter into the whole Tatyana Grosman experience in the first place,” recalled Helen Frankenthaler in 1993, speaking to curator Ruth Fine about her foray into printmaking. In the audio recording of their public conversation, which took place on the occasion of Helen Frankenthaler: Prints at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (April 18–September 6, 1993), her voice is sharp and her words are considered. Yet there is also the unmistakable presence of surprise, as if the path that printmaking took her on after her first visit to Grosman’s Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, New York, in 1961, was still somewhat unbelievable to her. “I felt very much a painter, and that, that was my main and only concern. Printmaking seemed sort of passé, and things that Europeans such as [Hans] Hartung made. I always admired [Joan] Miró, but was more involved in his painting,” she continues, both qualifying her outlook at the time and gently chastising it. It was Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers who eventually talked her into going to ULAE, pleading with her to join them even after she had turned them down, she explains. “And of course,” she says firmly, “I was hooked,” delivering this as if it were a punchline to which her own shortsightedness was the joke.

Frankenthaler’s engagement with what she called “the romance of learning a new medium” is testament to her ceaseless efforts to broaden her visual lexicon. Nowhere is this more evident than in what has become her most celebrated body of printmaking, her woodcut prints, the subject of a recent, tightly focused survey, Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty, curated by Jane Findlay at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London (September 15, 2021–April 18, 2022). Also evident is just how important the collaboration between artist and printmaker was in shaping these works—in particular the impact of her two most frequent collaborators: Grosman and Kenneth Tyler.

Frankenthaler referred to Grosman as the “velvet sledgehammer,” she told Fine in 1993, “because she had a will of iron and a grace and a generosity and a goal.” Grosman founded ULAE in 1957, and in the years that followed, her influential stewardship would help usher in what became known as the American print renaissance. Leading artists of the period, including Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and James Rosenquist, were drawn to the print shop, where, notes curator Amy N. Worthen of the Des Moines Art Center, Grosman established an ethos of experimentation and “permission to fail.”

Over the course of the eighteen years they worked together, Grosman not only taught Frankenthaler about various types of printmaking, from lithography to etching to screen printing and eventually woodcuts, providing foundational and practical knowledge about each, but also encouraged her to push the boundaries of what was possible, to challenge the parameters. As Frankenthaler explained to Fine, “Tanya was a great help and a good teacher and left you on your own, and nothing you envisioned seemed impossible.”

The first woodcut that Frankenthaler created with Grosman at ULAE, the quietly powerful East and Beyond (1973), was the first work that visitors saw as they entered Radical Beauty. East and Beyond has been “memorialized as the inception of an entire contemporary movement in woodcut printmaking,” writes print specialist Sarah Kirk Hanley. In this work, we see Frankenthaler taking a leap of faith with new tools in order to achieve the vision the medium conjured in her mind’s eye. Teaching herself how to use a jigsaw, she cut the wooden block into pieces that she had mapped out—recalling the technique favored by Edvard Munch, seen, for example, in his Woman’s Head against the Shore (1899). This approach represented a departure from the traditional method of woodblock printing developed in East Asia, in which a central image is carved into the block. Frankenthaler references this in the title East and Beyond, with “East” alluding to the medium’s history and “beyond” to her artistic interjection. By eschewing a central image, Frankenthaler directs our focus to the intricate pattern seen in the grain of the woodblocks, of which there were eight, each inked a different color.

Frankenthaler envisioned the work as showing no sign of the blade having cut the block into sections, which would typically present itself in the form of a halo or a thin band of negative space between forms once the blocks were inked, put back together, and printed. To achieve this proved difficult, requiring a great deal of precision and expertise on the part of the master printers Juda Rosenberg, James Smith, and Bill Goldston, who printed each piece separately using a letterpress. Even among the prints from the trial proofing stage where she was not happy with the registration, Frankenthaler found opportunity, however, giving some a second life by adding a smattering of orange crayon, as in East and Beyond with Orange (1973–74).

Similarly, Savage Breeze (1974), made the following year with the assistance of Rosenberg and Goldston, posed teething problems in its creation. In her conversation with Fine at the National Gallery of Art, Frankenthaler recalled that midway through she felt less involved in the process than she would have liked due to the hands-off, mechanical nature of its production. She continued to struggle to realize the work as she envisioned it; the work didn’t have the luminosity that she wanted it to. Demoralized, she told one of the workers, “If I can’t accomplish this on the next trip . . . then let’s scratch the whole thing,” a resort that she rarely considered. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, she decided to try and whitewash the paper before printing the blocks. It worked: the result both accentuates the individual elements of the image—the grain, the color, and the form of the blocks—and adds another layer of visual intrigue to the dynamism created by the electrifying shock of dark red that cuts across the picture plane, segmenting the sharp areas of apple green above and below it.

The legacy of Grosman’s encouragement to defy the standards of printmaking can be found in other works by Frankenthaler, too. For example, the lithograph Lot’s Wife (1971), created at ULAE with the help of Frank Akers and David Umholz, measures nearly eleven feet tall. This experimentation with scale would act as a precursor to what would come to be a defining feature of the woodcuts she produced with Kenneth Tyler at Tyler Graphics Ltd. Size was one of the primary factors that helped forge Tyler’s reputation, first in California and later on both the East and West coasts. He pushed artists to think big, to undertake ambitious and never-done-before technical feats. Robert Rauschenberg’s Booster (1967), for example, measuring nearly six feet tall, was then the largest hand-pulled print to date. It wasn’t until 1976 that Frankenthaler finally took Tyler up on his offer to collaborate, having turned him down previously because his West Coast workshop was, as Tyler remembers, “too busy, too frenetic, too complicated.”8 What came about as a result of their increasingly intensive and ambitious collaboration from the late 1970s through 2001, particularly in woodcuts, saw Frankenthaler and Tyler breaking new ground, taking the medium to uncharted heights technically, and redefining what the artist-printer collaboration could look like.

“The marvelous thing about Helen, all the way through her life, was anything that she would see, pick up, or touch, she would be interested in, and it always was: Can I make a mark with this? Can I paint with this? Can I do something with this?” Tyler reminisced in 2019, during a symposium organized in conjunction with the exhibition Helen Frankenthaler Prints: Seven Types of Ambiguity at Princeton University Art Museum.9 Tyler continued by telling the story of how the first woodcut he worked on with Frankenthaler, Essence Mulberry (1977), came to be. A highlight of Radical Beauty, and a premonition of what was to come in their collaboration, Essence Mulberry was inspired by the berries that grew on a tree in the orchard on the grounds of Tyler’s workshop. Frankenthaler had begun painting and drawing with the juice, captivated by the color. A tall, narrow work, Essence Mulberry is unusual in that Frankenthaler chose to leave a large segment of the handmade paper blank at the bottom of the work in order to showcase the beauty of its materiality. This creates a framing device that amplifies the epicenter of deep bluish purple, which transforms into a succulent crimson on either side of the print. This effect was produced by master printer John Hutcheson and Tyler using a color blend-roll technique whereby two or more colors are seamlessly blended through gradation. The technique is one not normally used in woodcuts, and it was the first time the studio and Frankenthaler had employed it in this way.

Another first is seen in the markings that appear across the surface of the print, produced from a technique that Frankenthaler devised and referred to as “guzzying.” Here, she worked over the surface of the woodblocks with various implements in order to create marks that act in opposition to the imprint of the grains, from four different types of wood—another innovative technical feat at that time. “Our print history and the trust and respect we had, made the ‘trial and error’ method we employed in making the woodcuts possible,” recalled Tyler, in reference to his collaboration with Frankenthaler, in 2012.

Frankenthaler’s final woodcuts with Tyler, a series of six prints titled Tales of Genji (1998) and the triptych Madame Butterfly (2000), formed the visual crescendos of Radical Beauty. Together, they represent an extremely laborious five-year period of development, with Frankenthaler energized by Tyler’s ambition, which was to “make something new that no one had ever done,” master printer Yasuyuki Shibata, who worked on both series, tells me.11 The works draw heavily on Shibata’s area of expertise, the ukiyo-e style of woodblock printing that flourished in Japan between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Frankenthaler had first experimented with the aesthetic of ukiyo-e printmaking some years earlier, in Cedar Hill (1983), produced jointly between Crown Point Press in San Francisco and Shi-un-do Print Shop in Kyoto. The technique uses water-based printing with vegetable inks to create gossamer layers of color. As a result, forms appear suspended in space, producing an intricate visual theater across the surface. Traditionally, this is done by hand and on a small scale. However, for Tales of Genji, Shibata was cross-pollinating, using a hydraulic press, favored in the West, with much larger absorbent paper than he was used to in conjunction with blocks that held the paint and repelled it. “It was quite challenging for us to make new styles of prints to fit Helen’s images. She knew exactly what she wanted so I had to push myself harder,” he tells me.

Frankenthaler and Tyler upended the traditional hierarchal delineation between artist and publisher to attain these startling results—a delineation that blurred in the highly charged atmosphere of the workshop in a way that was “never explored before,” Tyler recalled in the Princeton symposium. Because of the speed needed when printing with wet sheets, Frankenthaler and Tyler ended up making in-the-moment decisions critical to the result throughout the extended trial proofing stage for the Tales of Genji series and Madame Butterfly, because, “suddenly there’s no experience, no background, nothing written telling you how to go, no road map, you have to make decisions that are so fast and quick or you’re not going to be able to even see the results.”

For each of the six works that constitute the Tales of Genji series, up to fifty-three colors were applied, using up to twenty-one blocks of different woods as well as stencils employed in a pochoir fashion.  This process culminated in a total of 1,500 sheets being printed during the trial proofing stage for the series; from these, sets of thirty, thirty-five, or thirty-six prints of each work were selected for the final editions.

The Tales of Genji works are visually dense, with colors appearing to bleed into one another as in a watercolor, indicative of Shibata’s skill at finding a way to successfully translate the painted studies on which these works are based (all produced in 1995) into the medium’s parameters. The same is true of Madame Butterfly, “the jewel in Frankenthaler’s crown” that “truly transforms the possibilities of the medium,” National Gallery of Australia curator Jaklyn Babington writes. Involving Tyler, Shibata, Tom Strianese, and Michael Mueller, the expansive work was made using 102 colors, on 46 woodblocks, on two different types of paper. The visual complexity mirrors the confident layering of bold gestures and skillful incorporation of eccentricities that typify Frankenthaler’s paintings from the mid-1970s on. “After the success of the Tales of Genji series, I had more experience with the technique and a better understanding of what to expect from Helen. It became very different to what she originally painted on the piece[s] of wood,” Shibata says of the original maquette images.

“I think Tyler has a real gift for accomplishing what an artist wants by mixing and inventing certain combinations of mediums within the major medium,” Frankenthaler told Fine in 1993, her voice warm with admiration and respect. “And the Tanya origins within me feel this is not ‘pure.’” She continues wryly, with sense of certainty. “In another way, times do change and develop, I mean, we are driving automobiles and not carriages . . . in the end . . . it’s how the picture works,” she says authoritatively, with a prescience that anticipates the possibilities of what was to come of their collaboration over the next eight years.

First published by Gagosian Quarterly
https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2022/07/29/essay-romance-of-a-new-medium-helen-frankenthaler-and-the-art-of-collaboration/