Art · 20th century
1928–2011 · American
Colour Field painting — second-generation Abstract Expressionism
Helen Frankenthaler invented the soak-stain technique: oil paint thinned almost to water and poured onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the floor, so the colour sank into the weave instead of sitting on top of it. The method turned Jackson Pollock's drip into something luminous and watery, and it launched Colour Field painting.
Thinned oil poured onto raw canvas on the studio floor after a summer looking at the cliffs of Nova Scotia — the first soak-stain painting (1952)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (long-term loan)
Mountains and Sea, painted at 23; Morris Louis called it a bridge between Pollock and what was possible
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A great blue pool of acrylic spreading across bare canvas, named for an inlet of water (1963)
Detroit Institute of Arts
The Bay — an early triumph of her switch from oil to acrylic
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A large canvas of rising warm colour named for rushing water, from the year she abandoned oils for good (1967)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Flood
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A woodcut in which the grain of the block itself carries a stain of deep purple-red, printed with Kenneth Tyler (1977)
Museum of Modern Art, New York (and other collections)
Essence Mulberry — inspired by fifteenth-century woodblock books seen at the Metropolitan Museum
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
An early stained canvas named for a biblical stairway to heaven, which won first prize at the 1959 Paris Biennale (1957)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Jacob's Ladder
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia