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View all 141 artworks. Helen Frankenthaler lived in the XX – XXI cent., a remarkable figure of American Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Find more works of this artist at Wikiart.org – best visual art database.
- American
- December 12, 1928
- Manhattan, New York, United States
- December 27, 2011
Mar 23, 2021 · Instead of roping and lassoing and dribbling paint a la Pollock, Frankenthaler poured pools of highly diluted pigments onto her raw canvases. The thinned-out acrylics soaked into the fabric —...
- Susan Stamberg
- Violet to Indigo
- Soak-Stain
- Devotion to Color
At first glance, it’s hard to know what to make of Helen Frankenthaler’s heaving, atmospheric painting, The Bay. We see an imposing fluid blue promontory suspended in front of us. Its colors ranging from violet to indigo run into one another with a clear zone of navy near the top of the canvas that draw our eyes up to it. The blurring of the colors...
Frankenthaler’s approach here was to use a soak-stain method with diluted acrylic paint. Acrylics gave her more flexibility with viscosity and movement than oils, and allowed her more control as she poured that thinned paint onto the taut unprimed canvas so that it would get absorbed into the weave of the fabric. As a substitute for the action of t...
Mountains and Sea in turn inspired other painters to use this soak-stain method to great success, painters like Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Paul Feeley, whose canvases of floating thinned color heralded in a new era of abstract painting. The sense of natural spontaneity and devotion to color is part of what makes The Bayand the work of the Co...
Apr 19, 2021 · The piece was the first example of Frankenthaler’s hallmark soak-stain method of painting, in which the artist thinned her oil paint with turpentine to a watery consistency and then poured it across an unprimed canvas laid flat on the floor, an orientation she came to after watching Pollock work at his studio on Long Island.
Dec 27, 2011 · She invented the "soak-stain" technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint onto canvas, producing luminous color washes that appeared to merge with the canvas and deny any hint of three-dimensional illusionism.
- American
- December 12, 1928
- New York, New York
- December 27, 2011
Violet to indigo. At first glance, it’s hard to know what to make of Helen Frankenthaler’s heaving, atmospheric painting, The Bay. The top of the canvas (detail), Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 204.2 x 208.6 x 2.2 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler.
Helen Frankenthaler's breakthrough as an abstract painter came when she discovered that paint thinned with turpentine and poured on raw canvas yielded rich colors and unexpected forms. Her titles were inspired by images that seemed "to come out of the pictures."
