Helen Frankenthaler was an American painter, born in New York City on 12 December 1928, who died in 2011. In October 1952, at 23, she rolled a sheet of raw canvas out on her studio floor and poured thinned oil paint onto it, so that the cloth drank the color instead of holding it on top.
The painting, Mountains and Sea, launched the technique called soak stain, and a generation of Color Field painters took it from there.
Her name now travels with a few phrases: soak stain, Color Field, Mountains and Sea. All of them lead back to a single canvas, made in one autumn by a painter who was 23 years old.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The first people to take that canvas seriously were other painters. In the spring of 1953 the critic Clement Greenberg took three painters from Washington, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Leon Berkowitz, to her New York studio to see her work. Frankenthaler was out that day, so the painting had to speak for itself.
Louis came away with a sentence that has followed her ever since. Mountains and Sea, he said, was “a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.” It appears in John Elderfield's catalogue for the 1986 Morris Louis exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and it is usually repeated as praise.
I think it also sums up the difficulty of her place in the story. A bridge is something other people cross. Louis and Noland went on to make the stain the center of their own work, while the woman who had poured it first spent almost six decades being measured against them, against Pollock, and against the man she married.
What You'll Discover
Who she was before 1952.
What she took from Pollock.
What the canvas actually shows.
Why she would not repeat it.
What critics kept calling her.
How a stain became a print.