The Vocal Girls

The Vocal Girl;

The thing to do when in public, today's painters like to say, is keep mum and let one's canvases speak for themselves. But unhappily, not all modern canvases are exactly self-explanatory, and when the painters do open up, the listener can be in for a dizzy experience. Among the most successful of the second generation of the so-called School of New York are the three women whose works are shown in color (right). When they choose, they have a kind of eloquence.

Of the three, Helen Frankenthaler, 31, daughter of a judge, product of Bennington College, wife of First Generation Abstract-Expressionist Robert Motherwell, is in some ways the most daring in her work. "I often start with a canvas on the floor," she once said, "then work on it on the wall, changing back and forth, working at it from different sides." She usually begins with no particular idea in mind: "Let's say I start with some arbitrary color, or I simply start." Gradually, the picture builds--"an amorphous inner-world perspective that lies flat on canvas and yet flies out"--and when it is done, it is given a name.

The Frankenthaler canvas is apt to be wall-size, and every square foot can evoke a new mood. At times, the viewer thinks he may be under water, at times in outer space; often he has the uncomfortable sensation that he is looking at nature's gizzards. What is it all about? "I think," says Helen Frankenthaler, "that painting is a matter of making some kind of beautiful order out of human feeling and experience."

Blonde, intense Grace Hartigan, 38, has gone through more technical phases than either of her colleagues. She had her School of Paris period, her pure abstract period, and her time with the Old Masters. Then in 1955, "I began to look outside, to look around me, and I got involved with this whole area down here on the Lower East Side." As in City Life II, her colors are pounded into every available space, her strokes seem committed out of rage; the effect is one of extraordinary power.

To one critic, Grace Hartigan's painting seems to "venture frankly and deliberately into utter chaos." Nowadays, she gets her inspiration from turning away from the world and looking within. As a result, she says, her paintings are more "objective." "As soon as I left subject, I was able to go more deeply into content. Now I am trying to find my own internal world rather than the world that is across the street or down the stairs."

Chicago-born Joan Mitchell, 34, says that New York has become too "big, successful and public." So in 1958, Painter Mitchell went to live in Paris. There she wages constant battle against the obtrusive image. "I don't want to see anything on the canvas," says she. "For that, I could just as well look out the window." Yet she is still "bothered by the accuracy of my painting," for paint ing should be describable in no terms but painting. "It has to mean something. But I don't know what that means." .

There are times when a canvas seems to have a life that is completely its own. The flavor or color of a remembered land scape may start things off, but then the painting process takes over ("If it lasts too long, I get bored"). Once, when one such canvas was done, Willem de Kooning, 56, the Grand Old Man of the New York School, dubbed it Christmas Tree, because it had been painted at that time of year. But Joan Mitchell remembered the dark and blue feeling of a Wallace Stevens poem that spoke of peacocks and hemlocks. "So I called it Hemlock, but everyone thought I meant poison."

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