The visitors Greenberg let into the studio
The year after she made it, the painting did something paintings rarely do: it changed other painters on sight. In 1953, the critic Clement Greenberg brought two visitors from Washington, D.C., to see Mountains and Sea: the painters Morris Louis (1912–1962) and Kenneth Noland (1924–2010). The visit is commonly dated to 4 April 1953, and several accounts say Greenberg let the two men into Frankenthaler’s studio while she was out; the precise day is uncertain, and “one weekend in 1953” is as far as the record firmly goes. Both men were struck hard by what they saw.
They took it home and ran with it. Back in Washington, Louis and Noland began staining thinned color into raw canvas themselves, and out of that work grew Color Field painting and the loose group known as the Washington Color School. The technique Frankenthaler had pioneered in one studio in New York became a whole strand of postwar American abstraction. Louis later gave her the line her work has carried ever since, calling Frankenthaler “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible.” The line is often mis-told. It is Morris Louis’s characterization of Frankenthaler herself, reported later and popularized through the scholar Karen Wilkin, not a saying of Frankenthaler’s and not Greenberg’s; and it circulates in two forms, “what was possible” and “what ispossible.”
The picture some people called a paint rag
It was not loved on contact by everyone. Frankenthaler herself, with characteristic dryness, noted that the picture “looks to many people like a large paint rag, casually accidental and incomplete.” The thinness, the bare canvas, the absence of heroic brushwork, all the things that made it new, read to some early viewers as a picture that had not been finished. That charge, that a soaked, flat, understated canvas was somehow not a real painting, is exactly the resistance every genuine break runs into, and exactly what Louis and Noland saw past.
Owned by the Foundation, on loan to the nation
Frankenthaler kept the painting through her long life; it first went on public view at her second solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in early 1953. After her death in 2011, it passed to the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, her estate foundation, which owns it today. The Foundation has placed it on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., so that is where you can stand in front of it, though it is a loan, not a museum purchase, and the painting has never been sold on the open market. The standard line on its importance is the cleanest one: Mountains and Sea is to Color Field roughly what Monet’s Impression, Sunrise is to Impressionism, the painting the whole thing is dated from. A twenty-three-year-old poured it onto the floor, and a strand of American painting walked through the door she had opened.