Helen Frankenthaler
The stain technique of Colour Field painting.
Helen Frankenthaler poured thinned paint onto unprimed canvas so that it soaked in. The technique became the foundation of Colour Field painting.
Helen Frankenthaler was born in 1928 in New York. Her father was a New York State judge, and the family was well-off. She studied at Bennington College in Vermont and then took lessons from the painter Hans Hofmann. Through the critic Clement Greenberg, with whom she had a relationship, she entered the circle of the Abstract Expressionists early on.
She was deeply impressed by Jackson Pollock’s canvases on the floor. In 1952, at the age of 23, she painted Mountains and Sea after a trip to Nova Scotia. She laid a large unprimed canvas on the floor and poured out heavily thinned oil paint so that the colour soaked into the weave. The painting has light, almost watercolour-like fields of pink, blue and green. The work, owned by a foundation bearing her name, is on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The technique is known as soak-stain. Greenberg brought the painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to her studio, and they built on the method. She thus became one of the founders of what is called Colour Field painting, in which large fields of colour carry the picture on their own. From the early 1960s she worked with acrylic paint, which gave clearer and sharper colours.
In 1958 she married the painter Robert Motherwell. They were one of the art world’s best-known couples until their divorce in 1971. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1966. Later she also worked extensively in printmaking, especially woodcuts.
Frankenthaler died in 2011. She is regarded as one of the most important painters of the second generation of American abstract art, and her discovery of how paint can merge with the canvas changed painting after Pollock.