An American Abstract Expressionist painter, Helen Frankenthaler
was born December 12, 1928 in New York City, New York as the
youngest child of a New York Supreme Court justice. She attended
private schools in New York City, then went to Bennington
College in Bennington, Vermont, where she studied under Hans
Hofmann at the Art Students' League. From 1958 to 1971, she was
married to the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell.
Although greatly influenced by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky
and others, she soon developed her own approach to painting. She
treated each painting as a new work that had its own unique
requirements. She started experimenting with stain painting,
where an unstretched and unprimed canvas lying on the floor
would be treated with heavily diluted oilt-based paints to be
soaked directly into the fabric. She created silky pools of
color that, although abstract, evoked images of landscapes. As
Whitney Chadwick said of Frankenthaler, "She was not the first
artist to stain canvases but s