Frankenthaler’s 1951 encounter with Pollock’s work had a major impact on her. His black-and-white ink works on paper of this period suggested to her the possibilities inherent in directly staining the surface of paper or canvas, and she began to explore how to dilute her oil paint to the consistency of watercolors. Like Pollock, she placed her unsized, unprimed canvas on the floor. She applied the paint using a coffee can with a hole cut in it, which allowed her to create puddles that could be left as is or spread on the surface. Fusing foreground and background, color and plane, Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique created a sense of space even as it emphasized the flatness of the picture plane. Her approach proved influential to Color Field painters including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, both of whom visited Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953, where they saw her first soak-stain painting, Mountains and Sea (1952).
Often understood through the writings of Greenberg—who was responsible for taking Noland and Louis to her studio and who once owned Canal (1963)—Frankenthaler’s soak-stain paintings can be read as embodiments of the flatness of the picture plane and opticality, which Greenberg regarded as the most important characteristic of modernist painting. Greenberg thought that Frankenthaler’s use of color overcame the tactility of the picture plane and consequently produced a “purely optical” experience of painting. In soaking the canvas in color, Frankenthaler brought painting into the realm of pure vision. However, others have argued that her thinned-down colors, devoid of their glossy coating, actually called attention to the texture of the canvas.
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