**Helen Frankenthaler, *April Mood*, 1974 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy ASOM Collection**

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of women abstract painters from the 1940s to the early 1970s. (‘Action, Gesture, Paint’ is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London until 7 May.)

On entering the gallery, you’re greeted by Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘April Mood’, a joyous choreography of colour: royal and pale blue, purple and radiant pink, set against a base of sandstone and tangerine.

‘A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image.’
Helen Frankenthaler

There follows a selection of work by some 80 artists from all over the world. Big, bold, vibrant canvases. Audacious expressions of raw experience: joy, awe, anger and despair. Emotional responses to a world in crisis and to the beauties of nature.

'I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me - and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed.’
Joan Mitchell

These artists were liberated from the constraints of tradition and convention. As Ida Barbarigo declared, they wanted to ‘unlearn painting,’ to forget academic teaching.

I was particularly struck by the inventiveness of their working methods.

Some layered the paint on thick. Some scraped it and scratched it. Others spattered, splashed and sprayed; and liberally added dribbles and stains. Their gestures were occasionally spontaneous and occasionally controlled. Some mixed their paint with other materials: sand, sawdust, cigarette ash and cement; lacquer, chalk and carpenter’s glue.

*Work,* 1958-62, by Yuki Katsura. Image: Courtesy Alice and Tom Tisch, New York © Estate of Yuki Katsura

‘My paintings are collaged bits of time from my past and present experiences.’
Wook-kyung Choi

Frankenthaler achieved her fluid, organic effects by thinning her paint and applying it to unprimed canvas. Gillian Ayres worked at speed, pouring paint straight from the can, or squirting it directly from the tube. Lee Krasner integrated into her work cut-up fragments of newspapers, burlap and discarded drawings. Yuki Katsura placed wet washi paper on painted canvas and then overpainted it. Franciszka Themerson tilted her paper so that the enamel flowed in loose, curving calligraphic forms. Janet Sobel trickled pigment from a pipette (well before Jackson Pollock adopted his celebrated ‘drip technique’).

The exhibition repeatedly confirms a truth that pertains to any creative endeavour: if you want to change the product, change the process.

‘To me, art - colour in art – is wonderfully indulging… I don’t see why you shouldn’t be filling yourself up, making yourself happy. Enjoying yourself. Feasting on beauty. I want an art that’s going to make me feel heady, in a high flown way. I love the idea of that.’
Gillian Ayres

*Lee Krasner, Bald Eagle, 1955 (Credit: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation)*

One wanders through the exhibition with a faint sense of recognition. Many of these ideas, themes and approaches are familiar to us. But, with a few exceptions, the works and the artists are not.

The story of Abstract Expressionism, the art movement that emerged in New York in the late 1940s is classically written around titanic male figures like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

There were women artists on the scene, but it was a notoriously machismo culture. Corinne West painted under the name Michael West so as to disguise her gender. Elaine de Kooning signed her work with her initials to evade comparisons with her husband. Grace Hartigan became George and Lena Krasner became Lee.

'It’s quite clear I didn’t fit in. With relation to the group, if you are going to call them a group, there was not room for a woman.'
Lee Krasner

Elaine de Kooning The Bull 1959 (1) - Whitechapel Gallery

Over time the women abstract artists were marginalised or written out of the movement’s history. Recent retrospectives have included few females.

The Whitechapel exhibition endeavours to right this wrong. Regarding the past through a different lens, it changes our perception of something we thought we knew. And in so doing it has quite an uncanny effect. It is at once both familiar and fresh.

The show demonstrates that if you want to change the story, you should consider changing the narrator.

'… Sitting at this party,
Wondering if anyone knows me,
Really sees who I am.
Oh, it's been so long since I felt really known.
… Living in the wake of overwhelming changes,
We've all become strangers
Even to ourselves.
We just can't help,
We can't see from far away,
To know that every wave might not be the same,
But it's all apart of one big thing.
… Oh, it's not just me, it's not just me,
It's not just me,
It's everybody.’

Weyes Blood, 'It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’ (N Mering)

No. 409

‘Movement is everything. Movement is life. The second we’re born we squall, we writhe, we squirm. To live is to move.’

There’s a splendid production of the 2009 play ‘Red’ by John Logan running at the Wyndham Theatre in London (until 28 July).

It is 1958-59. Mark Rothko has been commissioned to paint a series of murals for the glamorous Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. In his paint-splattered Bowery studio he creates his work surrounded by whisky bottles, canvases, turpentine and brushes; in low light; to the sounds of Schubert and Mozart.

Rothko strives to convey raw truth, real feeling and pure thought - in maroon, dark red and black. His luminous paintings pulse with introspection, intensity and intellectual energy. He approaches his craft with high seriousness.

‘People like me… My contemporaries, my colleagues…Those painters who came up with me. We all had one thing in common…We understood the importance of seriousness.’

Rothko explains to his young assistant that he and his fellow Abstract Expressionists achieved their dominance of the post-war art scene by sweeping aside the previous generation.

‘We destroyed Cubism, de Kooning and me and Pollock and Barnett Newman and all the others. We stomped it to death. Nobody can paint a cubist picture now…The child must banish the father. Respect him, but kill him.’

Rothko’s assistant, however, is a fan of the emergent Pop Art movement; of artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. He challenges Rothko’s worldview.

‘Not everything needs to be so goddamn important all the time. Not every painting needs to rip your guts out and expose your soul. Not everyone wants art that actually hurts. Sometimes you just want a fucking still life or soup can or comic book!’

Rothko is unimpressed.

‘You know the problem with those painters? It’s exactly what you said: they are painting for this moment, right now. And that’s all. It’s nothing but zeitgeist art. Completely temporal, completely disposable, like Kleenex.’

Rothko’s frustration with Pop Art extends to the culture that has created and celebrated it. He rages against the triviality of modern life.

‘‘Pretty.’ ’Beautiful.’ ’Nice.’ ’Fine.’ That’s our life now! Everything’s ‘fine’. We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone’s laughing all the time, it’s all so goddamn funny. It’s our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn’t it? We’re a smirking nation living under the tyranny of ‘fine’. How are you? Fine. How was your day? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. Want some dinner? Fine…Well, let me tell you, everything is not fine!...How are you?...How was your day? How are you feeling? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine.’

The argument gets personal. Rothko’s assistant points out that the artist’s seriousness and self-importance don’t sit well with his latest commission.

‘The High Priest of Modern Art is painting a wall in the Temple of Consumption.’

For me these bitter exchanges resonate with the intergenerational strife that we often encounter today in work and broader society. Each age cohort seems eager to celebrate its own triumphs, but reluctant to recognize the virtues of the cohort beneath them.

My own generation, born in the ‘60s, rejoices in punk’s destruction of ‘70s lethargy and hippy self-indulgence. We lionize our mix-tapes, style tribes, GTIs and political engagement. We rejoice in our hedonistic teens and our industrious twenties.

Yet, we moan about Millennials and make sarcastic remarks about Snowflakes. We complain about young people’s technology addiction and attention deficit disorders; their narcissism, impatience and indifference; the artisanal gins and avocado on toast; no-platforming and eating on public transport.

The younger generation can quite rightly retort with ‘80s materialism, sexism and sartorial blunders; the environmental apathy and the plain good fortune of the property market. They can coin their own labels: Centrist Dads and Gammons and so forth.

This intergenerational squabbling gets us nowhere. It betrays an inability to see life through anything other than the prism of our own experience.

Surely each generation is equal but different. One generation dances with their feet; the other dances with their hands. One wears white socks at the gym; the other wears black. One watches TV together; the other watches phones together.

I have been in awe of modern youth’s ability to diminish the gap between thought and action; their entrepreneurial spirit and technical facility; their comfort with diversity and their capacity to keep life and work in balance. They’re just as political, but they care about different issues. They’re just as stylish, but in skinnier jeans.

OK. Their music is not as good…

In the field of commerce the businesses that thrive are those that truly trust and enable the younger generation; that integrate old and new skills; that recognise the imperative of change. Because if a company fails to embrace generational difference, then eventually 'the child will banish the father.’ And the mother too.

Towards the end of ‘Red’ Rothko has a change of heart. After a dispiriting trip to the Four Seasons restaurant, he backs out of the lucrative commission. And he dismisses his assistant with something approaching good grace.

‘Listen, kid, you don’t need to spend any more time with me. You need to find your contemporaries and make your own world, your own life…You need to get out there now, into the thick of it, shake your fist at them, talk their ear off… Make something new.’

No. 185

Female Abstract Artists: If You Want To Change the Product, Change the Process – And If You Want To Change the Story, Change the Narrator

‘The Child Must Banish the Father’: Mark Rothko and Intergenerational Strife