In the 1950s, Helen Frankenthaler developed an innovative approach to abstraction by soaking and staining the canvas with thinned paint.
Read MoreFrankenthaler began to exhibit in 1950.
Beach (1950), an abstract painting made using oil paint, sand, and coffee grounds, was featured in the group exhibition Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery at the Kootz Gallery in New York.
Frankenthaler held her first solo exhibition at New York's Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1951; that year, her early paintings were also shown in 9th St. Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at 60 East 9th Street, a seminal exhibition that brought Abstract Expressionism to the fore of American post-war art. Among the included artists were Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Barnett Newman.
The year 1951 also saw Frankenthaler initiate a new direction for abstract painting. After attending an exhibition of Jackson Pollock's works, she was inspired to paint with her canvases on the floor—instead of throwing paint, however, the artist developed her own, idiosyncratic way of pouring paint onto unprimed canvas and soaking the fabric.
Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique led to one of her most influential works, Mountains and Sea (1952). The painting evokes the landscape through soft, tinted fields of blue and green surrounding red in the centre. The new kind of flatness in her work, achieved by allowing thinned paint to fuse with the fabric of the canvas, soon prompted Frankenthaler's contemporaries, including Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, to develop Colour Field paintings.
During the following decades, Frankenthaler examined lines and their relationship with shape. Bold colours and hard-edged forms in blue, red, green, and yellow emerge in Italian Beach (1960). The 1960s also saw the artist engage with large expanses of colour in works such as The Bay (1963) and Indian Summer (1967). Frankenthaler also shifted to diluted acrylic paint from thinned oils, a development she made together with artist and her husband at the time, Robert Motherwell.
Helen Frankenthaler's woodcut prints are also renowned, through which she explored the various methods of applying colour and engaging the surface.
Cameo (1980), made from eight colour woodcuts, depicts a washed-out field of blue and purple with marks created with sandpaper and dentist drills. The triptych Madame Butterfly (2000) was printed from 102 colour woodcuts and 46 woodblocks, and captures the lyrical sensibilities found across Frankenthaler's paintings and works on paper.
