Biography
Helen Frankenthaler was born and raised in New York City. She attended the Dalton School, where she received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949 she graduated from Bennington College, Vermont, where she was a student of Paul Feeley and later studied briefly with Hans Hofmann.
In 1952 Frankenthaler created Mountains and Sea, a breakthrough painting of American abstraction for which she poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid on the studio floor, working from all sides to create floating fields of translucent color. The painting was immediately influential/or the artists who formed
the Color Field school of painting.
As early as 1959, Frankenthaler began to be a regular presence in major international exhibitions including first prize at the Premiere Biennale de Paris and in 1966 the 33rd Venice Biennale, alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski. Her first major museum exhibition was in 1960 at New York's Jewish Museum, and her second, in 1969, at the Whitney Museum of American Art was followed by an international tour.
Frankenthaler experimented tirelessly throughout her long career. In addition to producing unique paintings on canvas and paper, she worked in a wide range of media, including ceramics, sculpture, tapestry, and especially printmaking through the opening years of this century.
Recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century and eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, she is credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, she expanded the possibilities of abstract painting. While at times referencing figuration and landscape in unique ways, she produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound and continues to grow.
Frankenthaler's career has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions including major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum ~f Art, as well as an exhibit devoted to works on paper and prints organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. among others. Her work is found in major museum collections worldwide. frankenthalerfoundation.org