Helen Frankenthaler (New York, 1928-2011), was born in New York City, where she attended the Dalton School and received early art training from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949, she graduated from Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied under Paul Feeley. She later continued her education briefly with Hans Hofmann.

In 1950, her painting Beach was selected by Adolph Gottlieb for the exhibition Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. The following year, Frankenthaler held her first solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. That same year, one of her works was included in the groundbreaking 9th Street Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture.

By the early 1950s, Frankenthaler had become familiar with the work of Jackson Pollock and was deeply influenced by the expressive use of color in his action paintings. In 1952, she created Mountains and Sea, a pivotal work that marked a departure from the traditions of first-generation American abstraction. In this painting, Frankenthaler poured thinned paint directly onto raw canvas, producing overlapping, translucent areas of color that evoke the lightness and fluidity of watercolor. Her approach opened abstraction to figurative and landscape references, interpreted as floating patches of color.

With Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler’s work began to align with that of the artists later identified by critic Clement Greenberg as part of the Color Field movement, alongside figures such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.

Frankenthaler gained increasing recognition throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959, she won first prize at the Première Biennale de Paris, and in 1966, she was chosen to represent the United States at the XXXII Venice Biennale, together with Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski.

Her first major museum exhibition was held in 1960 at the Jewish Museum in New York, followed by another in 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which later toured internationally. A major retrospective organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth was subsequently presented at leading American institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1989. An exhibition dedicated entirely to her works on paper and prints was hosted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1993.

Over the course of her career, Frankenthaler received numerous honors. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2001, served on the National Council on the Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1992, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1974 until her death, serving as its vice-chancellor in 1991. In 2011, the year she passed away, she was named an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.