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Frankenthaler, Helen
(b New York, 12 Dec 1928). American painter and printmaker. She studied with Rufino Tamayo while at Dalton School, New York, with Paul Feeley (b 1910) at Bennington College, VT (1946–9), and privately with Wallace Harrison in 1949 and Hans Hofmann in 1950. In that year she met Clement Greenberg, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and others. Like several of the exponents of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM she was concerned with the forms and energies latent in nature. In the mythology of technical breakthrough that was part of the culture of the New York School, her work Mountains and Sea (1952; artist’s col.; see fig.) has an established place. Extending Pollock’s method of painting on unprimed canvases on the floor, she allowed thinner pigments to soak directly into the canvas. This created a closer relationship between image and surface, the weave of the raw canvas being visible within the painted image. At the same time the visibility of the canvas beneath the painted surface negated the sense of illusion and depth. It was a device that called attention to both the material and the nature of the medium. The technique also generated a new range of liquid-like atmospheric effects reminiscent of the watercolours of John Marin. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, the leading figures of a group sometimes known as the WASHINGTON COLOR PAINTERS, were among several painters who saw Mountains and Sea in 1953 and developed its implications in their own work. Louis in particular pursued the possibilities of the technique of ‘staining’ colour into the canvas.
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