The best-known pioneer of stain painting, Helen Frankenthaler created translucent, vibrant, fluid and color-saturated paintings that established her as a leader within the New York School in the early fifties. Much admired by the taste-making critic Clement Greenberg, Frankenthaler’s experimentation with pouring and soaking her paint onto unprimed canvas would influence the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Frankenthaler enjoyed a long and productive career and in 1969 received a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on the occasion of which critic Hilton Kramer concluded that while Frankenthaler made a great contribution to abstract painting with the staining technique, “ the real interest of her works lies elsewhere…in the quality of its expression rather than the technical means by which that expression is realized.” (1) 



Over a career that spans six decades, Frankenthaler’s art has received great critical acclaim, and has been noted for its painterly virtuosity and celebration of experimentation.  As the artist herself described: “I am an artist of paint, making discoveries.” (2) Perhaps even more important than the artist’s technical innovations is her unique sense of “place.” She invites the viewer into pictures that are themselves environments—places where she has been, places she has dreamed of, and abstract places of personal and artistic interest.  Writing in response to a 1975 exhibition of the artist’s work at André Emmerich Gallery, Kramer praised her ability to conjure novel viewing experiences: “The paintings of Helen Frankenthaler occupy a distinctive place in the recent history of American abstract painting….We feel ourselves in the presence of imaginary landscapes—landscapes distilled into chromatic essence.” (3) 

 

The luminosity of Frankenthaler’s paintings derives from her unusual “soak stain” method.  Frankenthaler’s ground-breaking and most well-known work, Mountains and Sea (on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), from 1952, launched the style of painting in the 1960s that would become known as Color Field.  In this work, she allowed thinner pigments to soak directly into the canvas. This staining created a heightened tension between image and abstraction. The weave of the raw canvas was visible within the painted forms, and, at the same time, the visibility of the canvas beneath the painted surface negated the sense of illusion and depth. In this way, Frankenthaler’s innovative device called attention to both the material and the nature of the medium. The technique also generated a new range of liquid-like atmospheric effects reminiscent of the watercolors of John Marin. 



1. Hilton Kramer cited in John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (New York: Abrams, 1989), 213. 

2. Quoted in E.A. Carmean, Jr., Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective (New York: Abrams; Fort Worth, Texas: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1989), 12.

3.  Hilton Kramer, “Art: Lyric Vein in Frankenthaler’s Paintings,” The New York Times, 15 November 1975, 21.