Frankenthaler, Helen

Frankenthaler, Helen (1928– ). American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in New York, where she has spent most of her life. She studied at various art schools, her teachers including Hofmann and Tamayo, and by 1950 she had met many of the leading Abstract Expressionists. The work of Jackson Pollock particularly impressed her, and she developed his drip technique by pouring and running very thin paint—like washes of watercolour—onto canvases laid on the floor. She first used this method in Mountains and Sea (artist's collection, on loan to NG, Washington, 1952), which is regarded as the seminal work of Colour Stain Painting (see COLOUR FIELD PAINTING); it particularly impressed Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland when they saw it in her studio in 1953. In 1962 Frankenthaler changed from oil to acrylic paint, which allowed her to achieve more richly saturated colour. The limpid veils of colour float on the surface of the canvas, but they often evoke suggestions of landscape: she believes that ‘Pictures are flat and part of the nuance and often the beauty or the drama that makes a work, or gives it life … is that it presents such an ambiguous situation of an undeniably flat surface, but on it and within it an intense play and drama of space, movements, light, illusion, different perspectives, elements in space'.

Frankenthaler has continued to exploit her stain techniques in her later paintings, often working on a large scale. She had her first major success in 1959, when she won first prize at the Paris Biennale, and since then has received numerous awards and distinctions, including representing the USA at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and at Expo 67 in Montreal the following year. In the 1980s her paintings generally became calmer in mood and more sombre in colour. Since 1960 she has also made aquatints, lithographs, and woodcuts; in 1964 she began to work in ceramics, and in 1972 she made her first sculpture. From 1958 to 1971 she was married to Robert Motherwell.