[1] Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s.

Growing up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and progressive Jewish intellectual family that encouraged all three daughters to prepare themselves for professional careers.

[3] While at Bennington, Frankenthaler studied under the direction of Paul Feeley, who is credited with helping her understand pictorial composition, as well as influencing her early cubist-derived style.

[11] She began to make use of single stains and blots of solid color against white backgrounds, often in the form of geometric shapes.

[9] By the 1970s, she had done away with the soak stain technique entirely, preferring thicker paint that allowed her to employ bright colors almost reminiscent of Fauvism.

This style was characterized by the use of hues that were similar in tone or intensity, as well as large formats and simplified compositions, all of which are qualities descriptive of Frankenthaler's work from the 1960s onward.

[14] The color field artists differed from abstract expressionists in their attempted erasure of emotional, mythic, and religious content.

This allowed for the colors to soak directly into the canvas, creating a liquefied, translucent effect that strongly resembled watercolor.

[19][20] The technique was adopted by other artists, notably Morris Louis (1912–1962) and Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), and launched the second generation of the color field school of painting.

[22] One of her most important influences was Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), an art and literary critic with whom she had a personal friendship and who included her in the Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition that he curated in 1964.

And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.John Elderfield wrote that the watercolors of Paul Cézanne and John Marin were important early influences:Watercolor... expands the brightness and flatness of plein-air painting because it visibly reveals these qualities in the whiteness of its support, which always makes its presence felt due to the insubstantiality of its covering.

In Cézanne’s case this transposition of techniques also encouraged him to leave uncovered areas of white canvas between patches of thinned-down oil.

Although Mountains and Sea is not a direct depiction of the Nova Scotia coastline, elements of the work suggest a kind of seascape or landscape, like the strokes of blue that join with areas of green.

[25] Swan Lake #2 (1961) depicts a large area of blue paint on the canvas, with breaks in the color that are left white.

When asked about the process of creating this work, Frankenthaler stated that she began by painting the numbers, and that a sort of symbolic, idealized garden grew out of that.

For this reason, in 1961, she began to experiment with printmaking at the Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), a lithographic workshop in West Islip, Long Island.

To create woodcuts with a resonance similar to Frankenthaler's painterly style, she painted her plans onto the wood itself, making maquettes.

But it has been far more apt to garner admirers like the critic Barbara Rose, who wrote in 1972 of Ms. Frankenthaler's gift for "the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions.

[4]The New York-based Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, established and endowed by the artist during her lifetime, is dedicated to promoting greater public interest in and understanding of the visual arts.

[37] In a 2023 lawsuit filed at the New York Supreme Court, Frankenthaler’s nephew Frederick Iseman claimed that Clifford Ross and other family members on the board exploited the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation “to advance their own personal interests and careers” and were committed to completely shutting down the foundation in the near future.

[42] On October 6, 2019, Frankenthaler was included in Sparkling Amazons: Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th St. Show at the Katonah Museum of Art in Westchester County, NY.

[46] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

[47] Every Sound Is a Shape of Time, a collections-focused group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, showcased Frankenthaler's work in the collection alongside Julie Mehretu, Jules Olitski, and Louis Morris, among others.

[50] According to the Los Angeles Times, "Frankenthaler did take a highly public stance during the late 1980s 'culture wars' that eventually led to deep budget cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts and a ban on grants to individual artists that still persists.

In a 1989 commentary for The New York Times, she wrote that, while "censorship and government interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and not part of the democratic process," controversial grants to Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work "of increasingly dubious quality.