Mountains and Sea

A 23-year-old pours turpentine-thinned paint onto raw, unprimed canvas on the floor, and instead of sitting on top it soaks in and stains the cloth like watercolor at mural scale. The soak-stain she pioneered here became the bridge from Pollock to Color Field.

1. 1
   The thin, translucent stains soaking into raw canvas

   Everywhere the color lies, the soft veils of blue, green, and pink

   The paint is not laid on top; it sits in the cloth as a dyed, matte wash, the way ink soaks into blotting paper. The edge of each color feathers and bleeds into the bare fabric instead of stopping at a hard brushed line. The pigment is embedded in the weave itself, which is why nothing in the picture casts the small shadow a ridge of brushed paint would. This soaking-in is the soak-stain, and it is what Frankenthaler pioneered with this canvas.
2. 2
   The visible charcoal drawing lines

   Loose dark contours running across and through the stained color

   Sketched directly onto the canvas in charcoal, these lines read as drawing left in plain view, not erased under paint. They wander over and through the washes so that line and stain coexist on the same surface rather than one hiding the other. That is part of why the medium line is “oil and charcoal,” not oil alone: the drawing is a finished element of the picture, not buried scaffolding.
3. 3
   The bare canvas left showing

   The large untouched stretches of pale raw fabric between the stained passages

   Wide areas of the cloth are simply left alone, the natural color of the unprimed fabric. This empty ground is not a gap waiting to be filled; it breathes between the pools of color and does real work in the composition. Leaving raw canvas active and on view, rather than covering it, is one of the quiet shocks of the picture, and a direct inheritance from the bare fabric Pollock let show through his poured webs.
4. 4
   The watercolor-like washes at large scale

   The pooled, diaphanous color across the whole roughly 7-by-10-foot canvas

   The pours behave like watercolor: pooled, luminous, see-through. But they are blown up to mural size, about 7 feet tall by nearly 10 feet wide (219 × 298 cm). That collision is the surprise of the work, an intimate, fragile medium handled at the scale Abstract Expressionism reserved for its biggest statements. The wash stays see-through to the cloth, the way a watercolor stays see-through to the paper.
5. 5
   The landscape suggestion of blue, green, and pink

   The green passage descending toward a band of blue, with pinks scattered through

   A green area dropping to a blue band reads as a rocky shore meeting water; pinks and blues scatter like spray and sky. It hovers between abstraction and a remembered coast and never resolves into a literal view. The picture grew from cliffs and sea Frankenthaler had painted that summer in Nova Scotia; she said the landscapes “were in my arms” as she made it, meaning the place is carried in the body of the painting, not depicted in it.
6. 6
   No impasto, no gesture

   The surface as a whole, the absence of any raised paint, drag, or brush “handwriting”

   There is almost no ridge of heaped paint, no scraped drag, no loaded brushstroke. The surface is flat and stained, color fused into the plane of the cloth. That flatness is exactly the break from Pollock’s raised drips and de Kooning’s troweled, gestural paint: the drama of the painter’s touch is gone, and attention shifts to pure color and field.