Brushstrokes of Brilliance: Discovering Helen Frankenthaler’s Paintings

Helen Frankenthaler was among the most significant American abstract artists of the 20th century, working across multiple mediums and amassing a large body of work. Celebrated for her pivotal contribution to Color Field painting, Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings stand out among her contemporaries due to her radical and technical experimentations through her career.

Frankenthaler began her artistic career at Bennington College in Vermont and was a student of Paul Feeley, graduating in 1949. Shortly after graduating, in 1950, the artist’s work was chosen by the painter Adolph Gottlieb to exhibit in Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. In that same year, Frankenthaler met the esteemed art critic Clement Greenberg, who would introduce her to some of the leading Abstract Expressionists in New York including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. By 1960 Frankenthaler had her first major museum retrospective at New York’s Jewish Museum and later in 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Experimentation Across Mediums

Helen Frankenthaler, ‘February’s Turn,’ 1979. Sold for $3,540,000 via Christie’s (May 2022).

Toeing the line between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, Frankenthaler expanded the possibilities of abstract painting through her invention of the soak-stain technique. This groundbreaking method involved the thinning down of paint with turpentine or kerosene, which would be poured over the unprimed canvas and seep into its weave. Producing an aura effect around flowing forms, the soak-stain technique created a distinct, psychologically fraught atmosphere in her works. Frankenthaler’s vast, amorphic landscapes with color washes stood in stark contrast to the work of the most famous Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. Unlike the existential confrontation with the canvas or search for the sublime in many of these first-generation Abstract Expressionist works, Frankenthaler was more focused on the natural landscape as her primary inspiration.

“She saw herself as a painter, but she kept going back to printing. I think it really nourished her”

Jane Findlay, Head of programme and engagement at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Frankenthaler additionally worked with ceramics, sculpture, tapestry and printmaking. In particular, she is renowned for her woodcuts which has led to associations with the American Print Renaissance which spanned the mid-1940 to the late 1980s. Woodcutting was a challenging printmaking technique, involving carved wood that Frankenthaler experimented with alongside the specialist Japanese technique ukiyo-e, or water-based printing.

In 2022, South London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery held the first ever exhibition focusing solely on Frankenthaler’s oeuvre of prints, entitled Radical Beauty. 

Mountains and Sea (1952) 

At the age of 23, Frankenthaler created her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea (1952), her first work using her renowned soak-stain technique. This marked her move into what later became referred to as Color Field painting. The work shows a layering of rose and cerulean-colored forms, where paint has been poured onto the unprimed canvas from coffee cans. Named after the seaside cliffs in Nova Scotia that Frankenthaler had visited previous summer, the painting evokes memories of a landscape.

“What concerns me when I work,” Frankenthaler told the New York Times in 1989, “is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is – did I make a beautiful picture?”

Helen Frankenthaler, ‘Orange Hoop,’ 1965. Sold for $2,500 via Bonhams (October 2023).

Provincetown Summers (1950s-1960s)

When Frankenthaler was 32, she joined a group of abstract painters clustered in Provincetown’s East End in Massachusetts. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s this is where the artist would spend her summers. The immediacy of the ocean and the changeability of the weather in Provincetown had an ongoing influence on her work. In 1951, Frankenthaler made a visit to Jackson Pollock’s studio in East Hampton, where she observed his risk-taking techniques using enamel paint on unprimed cotton duck unfurled on the floor. This inspired Frankenthaler’s own exploration of enamel paint.

In the early 1960s, the artist began to work with the solvent-based acrylic Magna, and water-based acrylics, evident in Summer Scene: Provincetown (1961). The variability of Frankenthaler’s Provincetown works can be observed in her experimentation that continued into the 1960s in terms of scale and process, in Cool Summer (1962) and Indian Summer (1967). Parts of the canvas are left unpainted, which enables a structuring of the composition. Frankenthaler noted: “[The] ‘negative’ space has just as active a role as the ‘positive’ painted space. The negative spaces maintain shapes of their own and are not empty.”

Later Works (1970s and Beyond)

Helen Frankenthaler, ‘Madame Butterfly,’ 2000. Sold for $60,000 via Christie’s (October 2008).

In the 1970s, Frankenthaler delved into experimenting with the medium of woodcut. Savage Breeze (1974) was the first of her woodcuts that were concerned with achieving the vibrant colors and fluid forms of her paintings. The woodcut medium brought further technical innovation to Frankenthaler’s work, developing a technique where she cut a thin sheet of plywood into separately inked shapes, and in collaboration with the fine art publisher, ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions), created a method for eliminating the white lines between them when printing. The result was a woodcut that had the appearance of painted wood. 

Madame Butterfly (2000) was Frankenthaler’s final collaboration with the print studio, Tyler Graphics. It’s an exceptionally complex work, involving 106 colors and 46 woodblocks. In this work Frankenthaler used traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e carving techniques and the floating forms are reminiscent of her soak-stain technique in the woodcut medium.

Collecting Helen Frankenthaler

Crucial to Frankenthaler’s legacy is the role that gender played in contemporary readings of her work. While Frankenthaler distanced herself from feminism and evaded questions about her identity as a woman artist, it could be argued that she was excluded from narratives and criticism around Abstract Expressionism due to her gender. In his essay from 1955, ‘American-type painting’, leading art critic Clement Greenberg failed to mention Frankenthaler – this is particularly notable as she had demonstrated her pouring method to him personally.

Despite the artist’s historic exclusion from art criticism, the market for Frankenthaler’s work in the 2020s encapsulates the growth in recognition that her work has received over the last 15 years. Demonstrating the astronomical scale at which Frankenthaler’s work has appreciated on the market, her 1975 painting Royal Fireworks, which was bought for $818,500 at Christie’s in 2011, sold for $7,895,300, via Sotheby’s in June 2020, representing over 850% increase in the price of her work. Other notable sales have included her large-scale acrylic painting February’s Turn, which sold for $3,540,000, above its pre-sale estimate, at Christie’s New York on 12 May 2022.

Frankenthaler’s innovative, technical developments throughout her career were part of what makes her work so exceptional and has had a profound impact on artists for generations. Her soak-stain technique shifted the direction of the Abstract Expressionists and gave rise to Color Field painting, while the development of her complex woodcut technique is unmatched.

Lucy Howie

Lucy Howie is a writer and PhD researcher based in London. She has expertise in contemporary North American and British art and photography. Lucy has worked in museums across the UK and has written extensively on the modern and contemporary art market.

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