Alexander Nemerov, FIERCE POISE
[0:01]Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:38]Alexander Nemerov is the author of Fear's Poison, Helen Frankenthaler, and 1950s New York.
[0:44]Alexander is a professor in the arts and humanities department at Stanford University.
[0:49]Before joining the faculty at Stanford, he was a professor in the department of the history
[0:53]of art at Yale University, from 2001 to 2012. A scholar of American art,
[0:58]he writes about the presence of art, the recollection of the past,
[1:01]and the importance of humanities in our lives today.
[1:04]He's the author of Soulmaker, The Times of Louis Hine, Silent Dialogue, Diane Arbus,
[1:09]and Howard Nemerov, War Time Kiss, Visions of the Moment in the 1940s,
[1:14]Acting in the Night, McBeth, and Places of the Civil War,
[1:17]icons of grief, Valm, Lutens, Homefront Pictures, the body of Raphael Peele, Still Life,
[1:22]and Self-It. I'm going to keep going with this book here, and Frederick Remington,
[1:26]and turn of the century America. He has curated exhibitions, including To Make a World,
[1:30]George Alt, and 1940s America. Among Professor Nemerov's recent essays are Meditations on Charles
[1:37]Birchfield, Winslow Homer, Dennis Miller, Bunker, Helen Frankenthaler, Joe Rosenthal,
[1:42]Gregory Crudson, Danny Lyon, William Eggleston, and Grandma Moses.
[1:47]His most recent books are Semiting Pearl Harbor and Soulmaker, The Times of Louis Hine,
[1:51]and he is now writing his next book, The Forest, a fable of America in the 1830s to be
[1:56]published by Princeton University Press, based on the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures he gave
[2:00]at the National Gallery in 2017. Welcome, Alexander. Thank you so much for coming on
[2:05]Momstone. Have time to read books. It's my pleasure. I am really excited to talk to you about
[2:10]fierce poise. Look at this beautiful book about Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York,
[2:16]gorgeous. Congratulations on this story. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
[2:20]And I have to tell you that my mother is like a massive Helen Frankenthaler fan. And like,
[2:26]is that right? Like obsessed with everything about her. And so when I got your galley way back when
[2:32]I was like, oh my gosh, Mom, you have to read this. So she loved it. And anyway, so I've been hearing
[2:37]about Helen Frankenthaler my whole life. So I'm delighted to talk to you about the book today.
[2:42]So why have you decided to write a whole book about Helen Frankenthaler? Are you also a huge fan?
[2:47]And have you been forever? Well, you know, Zibi, I think I've been hearing about Helen Frankenthaler
[2:52]my whole life too in a, but in a slightly different way, which is to say Helen Frankenthaler went to
[2:58]Bennington College. And her senior year was my dad's first year there as a professor. And she
[3:08]Helen took a class with him. And I guess they stayed in touch over the years periodically.
[3:14]I certainly recall her name. When I was growing up, I was born in Bennington, though we moved
[3:20]soon after that. But suffice it to say that she'd long been in the back of my mind, then I began
[3:26]to just be aware how much I loved her paintings. And sometimes when I write about artists,
[3:32]the, the reason for the liking and there is no other reason to write about art unless you
[3:37]have strong feelings about it. So that's a given. But in sometimes the strong feelings,
[3:43]the reason for them is, is manifest right in a moment. Other times it takes longer. And I think
[3:49]as I say in the book, I really needed to catch up to Helen and understand why her paintings
[3:55]moved me. And you know, Zibi, what I ended up coming away with was in choosing intuitively to write
[4:02]about the art she made in her twenties, you know, when she was just starting because the book is
[4:07]about taking her from just after her graduation from Bennington to up to the age of 31 when she had
[4:16]her first one person exhibition is that I wanted to understand value, love all the more
[4:24]Helen's way of portraying what it's like to be a young person. And to we all know how intense
[4:31]being in our twenties is. And I think Helen was someone who lived that intensity in a very powerful
[4:39]way and moreover had the power to portray it on the wing on the quick life has lived, translated
[4:46]into a static form. And I didn't necessarily, I was still, I had all those feelings, but I wasn't
[4:54]able to translate it into art and genuine feeling and quite the way that she was. So I think
[5:01]better late than never glad I caught up to her in my 50s. You know, although Helen died in 2011,
[5:08]I feel like we could probably have a decent conversation about her art where she alive now.
[5:13]Wow. And I love how you portray her as Jess. It's almost like, she's just another girl in her
[5:18]twenties in New York and like, well, you know what I mean? It's like, and yet she begins this
[5:22]legend. You have the scene. Like when she was feeling depressed, you said, you know, starting
[5:27]around years, 1953, Helen became depressed. She was paying sick calls to her mother who was
[5:32]increasingly ill. You talk about a bunch of other things here, blah, blah, blah. But New York Times
[5:37]critic gave faint praise to her heart and soul efforts, including her favorite, the best mountains
[5:43]and sea. The works were fresh, pale and pleasant, sweet and unambitious. And then you said,
[5:48]sinking into lethargy, Helen found herself thinking that in her whole life, nothing mattered very much,
[5:53]even her psychoanalytic sessions in which she usually placed great store,
[5:57]struck her as boring. She was, quote, not taking my life or myself or life or plans too seriously,
[6:03]not caring enough. She found herself taking afternoon naps. The sleep is wonderful, but the habit
[6:09]bothers me. And you just, you said, Helen was depressed because she felt like her life was
[6:13]at a standstill. So take me back to like that moment in her history and how that became a turning point.
[6:21]Yes. Well, if there's one painting people might know of Helen's off the top of their head,
[6:25]it would be the painting you're talking about mountains and sea, which she painted in one day,
[6:30]one afternoon, October 26, 1952. And although that painting now hangs in the National Gallery in
[6:38]Washington and has been there for a number of years, at the time as the Times review indicates
[6:44]it was met with disdain, not just by art reviewers, but by Helen's fellow artists who thought
[6:52]it wasn't, I don't know, serious and angsty enough. And she was kind of lectured to by
[6:59]the artist Larry Rivers and also privately her friend or sometimes friend of me, Grace Hartigan
[7:06]was very critical of that painting too. But Helen never really doubted that picture. You know,
[7:12]she said, the lightest touch is always the hardest one. And that's something I've really learned
[7:17]from her. You know, we can think you, me, anyone that gravity intensity, depth, as we say, is
[7:26]always the sole road, the royal road to seriousness, profundity. But Helen really brought me
[7:35]to appreciate, to value the quality of lightness, of air, of atmosphere, which that picture is
[7:42]so much about. And, you know, pleasure poised on a balance as a femoral full of grace, all of these
[7:49]things is what she portrayed. She knew to spend any more time on it would be to ruin it. But her
[7:54]lethargy, Zippy, had to do with precisely what she says. She wasn't sure even if she should be an
[8:01]artist anymore, even though she was really born to be an artist. She even interviewed kind of half
[8:07]heartedly for a job at time life, though she was really put off by the star-chee intellectualism
[8:15]of the whole time life building. She also was invited to help campaign for Adley Stevenson because
[8:22]that painting was made just 10 days or so before the presidential election that Eisenhower won
[8:29]in a landslide over Stevenson. So she was thinking about different options. And then at the moment
[8:34]you describe her show had gone up. She was still very proud of her paintings. No one was buying them.
[8:42]The reviews were diffident. Her fellow artists were suspicious. She was depressed for reasons beyond that.
[8:49]You know, part of what I say about being the 20s being an intense time as people, including Helen,
[8:56]are working out a lot of stuff. We're not working it out or both. And the depression, I think,
[9:03]was something that happened to her as it happens to many people unbidden. In that part of the book,
[9:09]I talk about her going to see this late Charlie Chaplin film called Limelight in which there's
[9:16]a very beautiful ballerina who looks remarkably like Helen. She's pictured in the book. And Helen,
[9:23]not surprisingly identified with this ballerina who, you know what, had this kind of psychosomatic
[9:29]illness that convinced her she couldn't get out of bed that, you know, just like Helen,
[9:34]you know, basically taking long naps and this feeling of illness and inadequacy was precisely
[9:42]related to her talent, you know, precisely related. If you watch a movie, which is wonderful, I think,
[9:47]to her incredibly rare ability as a dancer. So the same goes for Helen, which is to say,
[9:55]you know what, to be when we talk about an audience.
[10:00]We use that word artist.
[10:01]I think even me who's job it is to talk about artists can sometimes use that term very
[10:07]glibly.
[10:08]When in fact, it's a very mysterious term and in Helen's case, it means there's a tremendous
[10:16]amount of energy, volatile emotion that is in there, that is driven, sometimes almost
[10:24]too fast for one's own liking by a relentless pursuit of aesthetic form, you know,
[10:30]I must make a picture, I cannot not make a picture and that's a volatile thing to handle
[10:37]and not everyone can handle it well, Helen made it through, you know, without dumbing down
[10:45]or numbing down all of the different emotions from laughter to despair that her work
[10:51]portrays.
[10:53]You know, it's so interesting because I feel like writers are a type of artist and I think
[10:58]so many writers feel the same way, right?
[11:01]They just have to write it down or they have to create and they have to, you know, dedicate
[11:07]their whole lives to sitting in front of the computer on their sketch pad and trying
[11:11]to create at the expense of everything else, sort of similar to what you're saying about
[11:16]Helen and like there's so many people who are driven that way.
[11:19]And I'm wondering if you as a writer because obviously, you know, there's so much research
[11:24]and you're like such a renouncer scholar of all of this material, but you were all, you
[11:29]know, as a writer, do you feel pulled to be doing this type of writing yourself?
[11:33]Yes, I do.
[11:34]I think I'm much happier when I have written something in a day and it balances or structures
[11:42]my life and it is so I imagine not just a matter of mental equilibrium, but also, you
[11:48]know, one is trying to make contact with life, right, to use words like Helen used paintings
[11:56]to portray what it is to be alive and, you know, not in some universal sense, but precisely
[12:03]from the contingent partial limited vantage that one calls one's own.
[12:11]And yet the hope is that that perspective, that subjectivity we call it is not merely subjective,
[12:19]but is precisely by being so specific, accessible to other people, right?
[12:25]So with Helen, I've never tried to write a kind of door stopper omniscient biography.
[12:33]I've kind of used my own feeling for her work as my pathway into it.
[12:40]And hopefully not deviated from that at all.
[12:43]So as you know, each chapter of the book is about one single day in her life from the
[12:51]year 1950 to the year 1960.
[12:53]It's kind of unabashedly partial in that way too, but it's also true to Helen's art
[13:00]in the sense that she, like me, would suggest that, you know, anytime you're writing
[13:07]a sentence or putting paint on a canvas, you are presumably trying to do something that
[13:13]is not the same as ordinary life, not walking down the street or mailing a letter or whatever
[13:21]the case may be.
[13:22]And it's a religious conception of art in her case, which I'm attracted to, which is to
[13:27]say, you make a painting in order to reveal something about the world.
[13:34]And that revelation is not didactic, it is not moralistic, it is instead kind of sensory
[13:43]and specific to feelings that are almost impossible to describe, but, you know, feelings
[13:50]like lightness, lift, sorrow, you know, feelings that we have, of course, handy words
[13:58]for, but words that are just finely placeholder, you know, so Helen is someone who's pushing
[14:04]paint to be able to portray states of mind, states of being, even just the feeling of walking
[14:11]down the street with the light kind of dappling through the shadows of the trees in a way
[14:17]that doesn't kill those experiences, but makes them live, makes them visible to the rest
[14:22]of us.
[14:23]Beautiful.
[14:24]I mean, it's really like the power of art to evoke feeling, right?
[14:28]That's right.
[14:29]From your words to her work, that's really what all artists are trying, I think, at
[14:36]their core to do, right, communicate what's inside their heads in some way to somebody else's
[14:41]head.
[14:42]It's really cool.
[14:43]When you think about it, you know, that's ridiculous, but yeah, yeah, sort of a message
[14:48]in a bottle.
[14:49]Yes.
[14:50]It goes out there and the artists can't be sure where it will land, but the person who
[14:55]picks up the bottle will be the person for whom the picture was intended.
[15:00]And I love that you mentioned the structure and just holding up the book again, and I love
[15:04]how everything is in a day.
[15:06]That's so great.
[15:07]I mean, when you talk about like getting a slice of life of somebody's career to do
[15:12]it in such a creative way is, is amazing.
[15:15]I mean, there are so many ways you could have approached her life, right, like a bazillion
[15:20]ways.
[15:21]I'm sure you debated how to do it.
[15:23]This is so great.
[15:24]And it just shows her growth is like an artist and over time.
[15:28]And I don't know.
[15:29]That's just a great tactic.
[15:30]I love it.
[15:31]Well, thank you, Zibi.
[15:33]You know what?
[15:34]I didn't debate it.
[15:35]You did it.
[15:36]You just knew right away.
[15:37]I knew right away that that's the way it would be.
[15:38]I didn't know which days that was kind of fun to let the research dictate what might
[15:45]could and finally were the days of the book, but I knew that it would be these days.
[15:50]Yes.
[15:51]It would be structured on my own, like that I have to debate everything a million times.
[15:55]I'm just projecting how I imagined you would have done it, but oh, in fairness to you,
[16:00]I think sometimes that is the way it is for any writer, right?
[16:04]There are different formats and the right format becomes apparent only in the writing of
[16:10]things.
[16:11]So I understand that.
[16:12]It's just in this case, somehow it wasn't.
[16:15]I didn't need to go through that preparatory thinking.
[16:18]Yeah.
[16:19]I love that this is an upper east side girl book, as I sit here on the upper east side
[16:25]talking to you.
[16:27]And I spent a whole summer at Bennington, by the way, so I'm very familiar with it.
[16:33]I did a whole writing program, writing in photography, wait, this is a way I went, but yeah.
[16:37]Wonderful.
[16:38]Yeah.
[16:39]Yeah.
[16:40]I think Helen was such the upper east side person that when she did move to the lower
[16:45]west side, you know, she lived down in the west 20s when she was when the book starts
[16:51]out.
[16:52]I think her family, I think her mother, it was very shocked, you know, that she would be
[16:58]living on the west side, the lower west side, it seemed, possibly Bohemian.
[17:03]Yes.
[17:04]I subled an apartment in the meatpacking district when it was like just coming up a
[17:08]little bit south of that, but on the west side, and my mother on the upper east side had
[17:12]the same exact reaction.
[17:13]That was alright.
[17:14]So anyway, so what is coming next for you now, you have this beautiful book out in the
[17:20]world.
[17:21]Who are you?
[17:22]Are you going to profile a different artist next or what's your plan?
[17:25]Yeah.
[17:26]It's a great question.
[17:27]I'm contemplating what my next book will be.
[17:30]I'm writing a very different book right now, which is about America in the age of Andrew
[17:36]Jackson.
[17:37]Actually.
[17:38]Oh, I just was doing that with my daughter.
[17:40]Her test is on Thursday.
[17:42]You're literally, I'm like deep in Andrew Jackson time.
[17:46]Wow.
[17:47]What grade is your daughter?
[17:48]Seventh grade.
[17:49]Oh, fantastic.
[17:50]Yeah.
[17:51]Yeah.
[17:52]Right.
[17:53]So it's about America in the 1830s, and it's kind of the opposite of the Frankenthaler
[17:58]book in the sense that it's told from the vantage of many, many people known and unknown
[18:04]from that time.
[18:06]So I mentioned Andrew Jackson because he's a good place marker for that era, the 1830s,
[18:13]but it's actually a different kind of writerly challenge where it's everyone from farmers,
[18:19]slaves, poets, painters, politicians, and so on.
[18:24]So I'm enjoying that a lot.
[18:26]Wow.
[18:27]We'll have to read that one.
[18:28]Now I feel like I am so clear on exactly what was going on at that time, whereas perhaps
[18:34]that I not brushed off on it over the weekend, I wouldn't have it.
[18:37]Well, yeah, me too.
[18:39]Me too.
[18:40]I mean, one writes, I don't know if this is true for you, but it must be in some way that
[18:44]one writes to learn, right?
[18:46]I think writing about Helen, I don't know.
[18:50]There's this curious way that one writes from a position of feeling that one already
[18:56]has, as I was talking about, but at the same time, one discovers more the nature of that
[19:03]feeling by virtue of the writing.
[19:06]And I've been thinking about the Helen book now that in ways I didn't really appreciate
[19:11]when I was writing it, it was a kind of coming into being of my own feelings about Helen
[19:16]by virtue of writing the book, if that makes sense.
[19:18]Like, not in a way that really I could turn into formula and, you know, simple descriptive
[19:27]sentences because I don't really believe in that.
[19:30]And I tell my students here, for example, that they should avoid the phrase, my book
[19:36]is about, you know, this artist and so on because that word about, though it's understandable
[19:42]why people use it implies a, you know, like the artist is over there.
[19:46]And I say, instead, you know, you should say, I write with the artist.
[19:51]And although the with is complicated because one doesn't want to be sort of just the
[19:57]publicist as it were for the artist, right?
[20:00]It's not what it's about.
[20:01]The width I take to mean has to do with kindred feeling,
[20:05]like wanting to inhabit the artist's fantasy
[20:08]and to write from that perspective
[20:10]as opposed to distancing it and turning that fantasy
[20:15]that whole imaginative life into kind of an object,
[20:19]which, I don't know, is limiting, I think.
[20:24]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[20:27]Yes, I guess so.
[20:29]Write about what moves you.
[20:31]That's one thing, yeah.
[20:33]And discover what it is that moves you by writing.
[20:38]And often, I think that means instead of going to a museum
[20:42]and feeling on a bound to look at all 1,000 paintings
[20:47]each one for two seconds, instead pick one thing that moves you.
[20:52]Maybe by an artist you know you want to look at.
[20:55]Maybe by someone you've never heard of, whatever it is.
[20:59]It might be like a painting of a meadow with a stream
[21:03]running through it of a kind that even as you stand there
[21:06]for five, 10, 15 minutes, a whole hour,
[21:09]or even for just 30 seconds before your friend drags you off
[21:12]to get a espresso, it stays in your mind.
[21:15]And then it becomes the basis, the kernel, for some idea.
[21:20]And maybe it has to do with a memory you have,
[21:22]maybe it has to do with some movie you saw once
[21:26]that featured a similar scene who knows.
[21:28]But I would say right from that moment,
[21:30]from that stream, in that field and that stream
[21:33]is a kind of source for all that one has to give.
[21:37]So I guess a believer in the oak growing from the acorn.
[21:44]Beautiful.
[21:44]Great.
[21:46]Well, thank you for coming on, Momstone,
[21:48]have time to read Bex Alexander.
[21:50]Thank you for this intimate look into Helen's life
[21:53]and her art, which I will never look at quite the same way
[21:56]again.
[21:57]And thank you for this conversation.
[21:59]You're very welcome.
[22:00]Thank you, Zibi.
[22:00]OK, take care.
[22:02]All right, bye-bye.
[22:04]Thanks for listening to this episode of Momstone.
[22:06]Have time to read books.
[22:08]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[22:11]and at Momstone.
[22:11]Have time to read books.
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[22:19]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan Beck,
[22:21]Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[22:23]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[22:25]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.