"I’M LOOKING OUT AT THE OCEAN—where the sky meets the horizon of the water—and it’s always changing. Today there are a lot of boats out, their sails like short white paint strokes. I wish you and Kathryn [my wife] could be here with me to see it." And we did, too.
 
This December Frankenthaler will celebrate her 79th birthday (born in New York City, a daughter of State Supreme Court Justice Alfred Frankenthaler). This autumn also marks 55 years of her work as a major American artist, from an extraordinary creative career now beginning to match in length those of Michelangelo, Titian and Picasso.

Unlike virtually all other artists (Frank Stella, with his "Union Pacific," is a parallel exception), Frankenthaler began with a masterpiece—her "Mountains and Sea," painted on October 26, 1952, when she was 23 and only three years out of Bennington College. (Bennington itself would become the center of Color Field painting in the 1960s; an exhibition of Frankenthaler’s 1972 sculpture will be on view there this fall.) Painted in her New York studio in one session, "Mountains and Sea" encompasses ideas and images Frankenthaler had gained from a summer trip to Nova Scotia earlier that year, and especially, as she has remarked, "the unique contrast between the great wooded peaks and the horizontal ocean—the mountains and sea of its title." (The phrase may find its origin in Psalm 46:2, "and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.")
 
Art history tells us that the innovation of "Mountains and Sea" was Frankenthaler’s introduction of "stain painting"—using thinned paints on unprimed canvas such that the painted elements are consistent with the picture’s surface. It is this new formal character that gave the picture its legendary status. However, while it is true that Washington, D.C., artists Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland visited Frankenthaler’s studio to see the work on April 3, 1953, it would be a few years before its full influence was revealed in Louis’s "Veils" and the first of Noland’s "Targets."

Frankenthaler scholar and chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art John Elderfield has placed the large (7' 3" x 9' 9") physical size of "Mountains and Sea" in the context of similar-scale works by Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, all in some manner "color and field" artists. But setting aside Pollock’s big paintings, in fact only eight works from 1948 to 1952 by Rothko and only one painting (1952) by Newman are equal to or exceeded the size of "Mountains and Sea," so that its exceptional dimensions partly account for the impact it made at the time.

From "Mountains and Sea" to the present we might generally divide Frankenthaler’s oeuvre into two parts, along formal and expansive grounds. The first period, continuing up to around 1975, might be termed "stain paintings," the artist using this formal approach in pictures that engage unpainted white canvas as part of the composition as well as some pictures in which stained passages fill the entire field.

By contrast, the second period is heralded by layered and nuanced applications of thick paint, creating a more complex or perhaps richer expression. Interestingly, in the way that the Nova Scotia trip had produced "Mountains and Sea," so her 1976 travels in Arizona brought forth pictures with the earth tones and gradations of the Western landscape—introducing the painterly vocabulary that continues to the present.