"We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing"
About this Quote
Frankenthaler is describing critique as an almost forensic act: a painting isn’t a burst of inspiration you either “get” or don’t; it’s a constructed event you can take apart screw by screw. The key word is “sift.” It implies patience, mess, and rigor - the opposite of the romantic myth that abstract painters simply channel feeling onto canvas. She’s also insisting that the supposedly ineffable (why a work “worked”) can be chased down through concrete decisions: paint handling, subject matter (yes, even in abstraction), scale, drawing.
The subtext is a defense of seriousness in a moment when her kind of work was easy to caricature. As a central figure in postwar American abstraction, Frankenthaler moved painting toward staining, soaking, letting pigment seep into unprimed canvas. To skeptics, that looked like accident; to her, it was control exercised through risk. When she names “size” alongside “drawing,” she’s quietly arguing that composition isn’t only line and form but bodily experience - what the canvas does to you at arm’s length, across a room, in a museum where scale becomes persuasion.
There’s another layer: “we would” hints at community, at studio talk and peer pressure. This isn’t solitary genius; it’s an ecosystem of looking, judging, revising. The intent is to normalize evaluation without killing mystery: keep the wonder, but interrogate the mechanics. In Frankenthaler’s world, feeling is real - and it’s engineered.
The subtext is a defense of seriousness in a moment when her kind of work was easy to caricature. As a central figure in postwar American abstraction, Frankenthaler moved painting toward staining, soaking, letting pigment seep into unprimed canvas. To skeptics, that looked like accident; to her, it was control exercised through risk. When she names “size” alongside “drawing,” she’s quietly arguing that composition isn’t only line and form but bodily experience - what the canvas does to you at arm’s length, across a room, in a museum where scale becomes persuasion.
There’s another layer: “we would” hints at community, at studio talk and peer pressure. This isn’t solitary genius; it’s an ecosystem of looking, judging, revising. The intent is to normalize evaluation without killing mystery: keep the wonder, but interrogate the mechanics. In Frankenthaler’s world, feeling is real - and it’s engineered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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