In the fall of 1952, at the age of 23, Helen Frankenthaler made her legendary painting Mountains and Sea, the first work she created using her celebrated soak-stain technique. Thinning down her paint with turpentine or kerosene, the artist developed a medium that would seep into and through the weave of unprimed canvas. The resulting stain, which often left a surrounding aura, gives a sense of perpetual movement to a work while simultaneously joining image and ground.
Titled after the seaside cliffs Frankenthaler had visited in Nova Scotia the previous summer, Mountains and Sea is one of her many abstractions─including Autumn Farm and Acres (both 1959)─that evoke memories of landscapes. The organic qualities of Frankenthaler’s painting, however, have as much to do with the properties of the artist’s materials as with any actual reference to nature. Frankenthaler, who insists that she is not an Action painter, makes the fluidity of the paint─ not the motion of the painter, as in Jackson Pollock’s drip technique─primary to the animation of her work.
Abstract that art 