Helen Frankenthaler (New York, NY, 1928 – Darien, CT, 2011) transformed the relationship between pigment and support, pouring paint thinned nearly to the consistency of water onto raw, unprimed canvas so that color soaked directly into the fibers rather than sitting on a painted surface, eliminating the traditional distinction between image and ground.

She arrived at this soak-stain technique with Mountains and Sea (1952), a canvas built from pale washes of color that critics recognized immediately as a departure from the thick impasto of her Abstract Expressionist elders; the method was never purely accidental, "you have to know how to use the accident," she said, "how to recognize it, how to control it." The technique influenced her contemporaries Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and her work was included in Clement Greenberg's 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, though Frankenthaler's own compositions, built through editing, layering, and deliberate decisions about where a pool of color should stop, resist the more mechanical readings that exhibition later encouraged.

In later decades she extended the same sensibility across an increasingly wide range of media and scale, from paintings whose color spread to fill the entire canvas to a sustained woodcut practice that reproduced the fluid, atmospheric effects of the soak-stain technique in an entirely different material: since a woodblock cannot be poured, translating the appearance of a wet, bleeding edge into carved wood and separately printed color required a technical ingenuity as considerable as the painting itself.

Frankenthaler represented the United States at the 1966 Venice Biennale alongside Ellsworth Kelly and Roy Lichtenstein, received major retrospectives at the Whitney (1969) and the Museum of Modern Art (1989), and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2001. Her work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and the National Gallery of Art.