Helen Frankenthaler was born in Manhattan in 1928 and was a major figure in American abstract painting. She was included in Clement Greenberg's landmark 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, which launched a newer generation of abstract painters. Frankenthaler emerged as one of the major proponents of Colour Field painting, which was largely characterized by large fields of solid colour spread across the canvas to create a flat picture plane. Frankenthaler was heavily influenced by the formalist and New York School discourse, which she encountered during her schooling at Bennington College in Vermont. In the 1950s so too did Frankenthaler find herself highly engaged in New York's artistic circles, which included Greenberg, Jackson Pollack, Hans Hoffmann - under whom she studied - as well as Robert Motherwell, to whom she was married from 1958 to 1971.
Frankenthaler's work can be found in major public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York; National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Tate in London; and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna.