Helen Frankenthaler, second-generation Abstract Expressionist and painterly innovator, has passed away. After studying art at Bennington College, Frankenthaler met and dated the preeminent modernist critic Clement Greenberg, and found her way into the burgeoning New York art scene of the 1950s. She met leading artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and her future husband, Robert Motherwell, and quickly developed her artistic practice. Inspired in part by Pollock’s drip paintings, Frankenthaler began pouring paint directly onto raw canvas, staining it with large swathes of color. This technique galvanized subsequent generations of painters, including Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and other members of the Color Field movement. Frankenthaler was 83.
Above: Canyon, 1965, acrylic on canvas
