A 23-year-old back from the coast

In the fall of 1952, a painter who is twenty-three years old walks back into her New York studio carrying a coast in her head. Her name is Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011). That summer she had traveled up to Cape Breton, on the Atlantic shore of Nova Scotia, Canada, and painted from nature there, in front of the rock and the water. She is not going to paint what she saw. She is going to paint what it left in her.

The picture did not arrive out of nowhere. Frankenthaler had a serious schooling. She had absorbed Cubism (the Picasso-and-Braque way of breaking a subject into flat, overlapping planes) and the lessons of modern abstraction, and she had been taken up by the critic Clement Greenberg(1909–1994), the most powerful art writer in New York, who was both her champion and, for several years, her companion. Through that world she had watched the reigning giants of the new American painting at close range.

She was also, at twenty-three, a young woman entering a New York scene whose reigning style prized exactly the things she was about to drop, the big, muscular, visibly male gesture of Willem de Kooning’s brush and Jackson Pollock’s flung arm. The move she made here ran the other way, toward soaked, quiet, drawn color, and it is part of why the picture read as a break.

Of the giants she had watched, one mattered most: Pollock (1912–1956). In 1951 Frankenthaler had seen Pollock’s poured paintings and been knocked sideways by them. Pollock did something nobody before him had quite done: he took the canvas off the easel, tacked it to the floor, and walked around it, trailing and flinging liquid house paint off sticks so the picture was built from his whole body moving over it rather than a hand at a wall. Pouring paint was Pollock’s precedent, not Frankenthaler’s invention, and that distinction will matter shortly. She wanted in on what he had opened, but she did not want to copy it. She later said of Pollock’s work that she wanted to “live in this land,” not move into his house but find her own way across the same ground.

So here is the situation in the studio. A young painter, fluent in abstraction, stirred by Pollock’s floor-bound pours, and freshly full of the cliffs and sea of Nova Scotia, is standing over a length of canvas looking for a way to get the landscape out of her arms and into the cloth. What she did next was simple and consequential.