Helen Frankenthaler

In 1952, near the outset of her career as an abstract painter, Helen Frankenthaler placed canvas onto the floor and poured turpentine-thinned oil paint directly onto the unstretched surface, creating a technique that became known as “stain painting.” This innovative procedure was celebrated for its emphasis on the inherent flatness of the two-dimensional medium. The uneven rate of the paint’s absorption into the raw, unprimed fabric enabled Frankenthaler to create swathes of densely saturated color or areas of diaphanous pooling.

Jackson Pollock’s propulsive dripping and flinging of paint onto horizontally oriented canvases influenced Frankenthaler’s chosen method. Frankenthaler, in turn, inspired her fellow second-generation Abstract Expressionists, including Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, to adopt staining practices. Critics referred to these artists as either Color Field painters, due to their emphasis on free-form stretches of color, or practitioners of Postpainterly Abstraction, terminology that emphasizes the artists’ replacement of gestural, sweeping brushstrokes with directly poured paint.

In the early 1960s Frankenthaler began to incorporate acrylic paints into her process. This synthetic medium would dry before it was able to fully soak into the support, “flooding” the canvas with color and leaving her with brighter results. For works such as Flood, she was able to execute forms quickly and create clear delineations between bands of color. If, as she described, “I don’t start with a color order but find the color as I go,” then in Flood she found a deluge of variegation. Despite her abstract working mode, Frankenthaler’s paintings recall the natural world. Flood demonstrates how nonrepresentational striations can also suggest sky, clouds, water, and earth.