Helen Frankenthaler

Emerging in the generation just behind the brawling boys' club that was Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, Helen Frankenthaler was the one who drew the most radical conclusions from Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, especially the way they dissolved linear forms into an overall optical fabric. In her 1952 breakthrough, Mountains and Sea, she took this insight a crucial step further, pouring diluted paint from coffee cans directly onto a large raw canvas on the floor of her Manhattan studio. This produced translucent washes of rose, blue and celadon that blurred all distinction between image and background. To the omnipotent critic Clement Greenberg, Frankenthaler had arrived at the next station of what he insisted was painting's inevitable journey toward flatness. Now the broad planes of pigment in Matisse would provide a way out of the knotty Cubist space of Picasso. Her work also turned a key in the minds of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. With Frankenthaler, who was 83 when she died on Dec. 26, they developed what came to be called color-field painting. By the early '60s, it dominated American art. Though she might rework a canvas repeatedly, her goal was always to arrive at a picture that seized the eye and the mind in a flash. "A really good picture," she once said--and she could have been talking about any number of her own--"looks as if it all happened at once."