Helen Frankenthaler Obituary: Artist Who Rejuvenated the Post-Pollock Era

GUARDIAN
By Michael McNay

Helen Frankenthaler in 1956. Her work never departed from the example of
Mountains and Sea. Photograph: Gordon Parks/Getty Images

NEW YORK -  At the age of 23 Helen Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea (1952), an abstraction that freed up the logjam in postwar American art following the first sensational burst of creative activity by the abstract expressionists. The method and the scale of it was, of course, borrowed from Jackson Pollock's procedure, but it was totally devoid of Pollock's angst-ridden search for the sublime. Frankenthaler said later that, fresh from the north Atlantic, she painted from the memories absorbed into not only her mind but her wrists as well. Painting became once again, as in many of its best periods, an instinctive coalition of hand and eye and controlling intelligence. Colour field painting is what was possible, the next big thing in American painting. Helen Frankenthaler, artist, born 12 December 1928; died 27 December 2011 [link]