Helen Frankenthaler was born Dec. 12, 1928, in New York City, where she attended the Dalton School, receiving early art training from Rufino Tamayo. In 1949 she graduated from Bennington College, Vermont, where she was a student of Paul Feeley. She later studied briefly with Hans Hofmann.
In 1950, Adolph Gottlieb selected the painting Beach (1950) for inclusion in the exhibition entitled Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery. Her first solo exhibition was presented in 1951 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, and that same year one of her works was included in the landmark exhibition 9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture. By the early 1950s, Frankenthaler had come into contact with the work of Jackson Pollock, becoming fascinated by the expressive power of the use of color in the Action Painting master’s canvases. In 1952 she created Mountains and Sea, a break with the first-generation U.S. abstractionist tradition: diluted color is poured directly onto the raw canvas, creating an effect of overlapping translucent, “watercolor-like” backgrounds. Abstraction opens up to figurative and landscape suggestions treated as patches of color floating in space. With the work Mountains and Sea Frankenthaler’s research comes close to that of the group of artists recognized by Clement Greenberg as belonging to the school of 
Color Field, including, in addition to Frankenthaler herself, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
In 1959, Frankenthaler won first prize at the Première Biennale de Paris. In 1966 she was called to represent the United States at the XXXIII Venice Biennale, along with Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein and Jules Olitski. Her first major museum exhibition was in 1960, at the Jewish Museum in New York, and her second, in 1969, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, followed by an international tour. A major retrospective exhibition was organized by the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth in the following years, which was later mounted at other major American institutions such as: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts in New York (1989). An exhibition dedicated exclusively to works on paper and prints was organized at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1993.
Frankenthaler was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2001; served on the National Council on the Arts of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1992; was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1974-2011), serving as its vice-chancellor in 1991; and finally, was named an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2011, the year she passed away.