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Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928)
Helen Frankenthaler received her formal education at Bennington College and continued additional studies in the studios of Ruffino Tamayo and Hans Hoffman. She is considered the country's most prominent living female artist and an important and major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Two major aspects of Frankenthaler’s work are her contribution to modernism and her allusion to naturalism.
Influenced by Pollack’s drip paintings, in the 1950’s Frankenthaler developed an innovative staining technique in which acrylic pigment is poured directly onto unsized canvas. She thinned her paint with turpentine to allow the diluted color to penetrate quickly into the fabric, rather than build up on the surface. This revolutionary soak-stain approach not only permitted the spontaneous generation of complex forms but also made any separation of figure from background impossible since the two became virtually fused. This technique opened a new door of expression for herself and several other important artists, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland and came to be known as color field painting.
Her work has been the subject of several museum retrospective exhibitions and is in the collections of museums worldwide. In 2001 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
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