Helen Frankenthaler

Frankenthaler poured paint onto unprimed canvas laid on the floor and let it soak in. The technique, which she called 'soak-stain', produced fields of translucent colour that looked like watercolour at mural scale. Mountains and Sea (1952), painted after a trip to Nova Scotia, was the first. She was twenty-three. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland visited her studio, saw Mountains and Sea, and went home to Washington, D.C., to develop their own versions of the technique. The visit launched Color Field painting, an entire movement that began with one artist looking at another artist's studio floor. She studied at the Dalton School under the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, then at Bennington College. She moved to New York and became part of the Abstract Expressionist circle, dating Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the era. The relationship gave her access and visibility that other women artists did not have, which she acknowledged. It also meant her work was perpetually discussed in relation to his opinions, which she resented. She was married to Robert Motherwell from 1958 to 1971. Both were painters. Both were prominent. The marriage was competitive. After the divorce she continued working for another forty years, moving between painting, printmaking, and sculpture. The late paintings are simpler: one or two large shapes of colour floating on bare canvas. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2001. She died in 2011, at eighty-three. Her technique of staining raw canvas changed what painting could look like, and she spent six decades proving it was not a one-trick discovery.