After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956-1959
with a conversation between Helen Frankenthaler and Julia Brown
Essays by Julia Brown & Susan Cross
4to. pp. 96. profusely illustrated. chronology. bibliography. hardcover. dw. (near fine). [New York]: Guggenheim Museum & Abrams, [1998].
Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
ISBN-10: 0810969114 / ISBN-13: 9780810969117
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
In 1952, at the age of 23, Helen Frankenthaler created her legendary painting Mountains and Sea. She poured thinned-down pigment directly onto unprimed canvas to be absorbed into its fibers. This large painting, the first in which Frankenthaler used her soak-stain technique, synthesized the influences that had informed her work to that point and announces her arrival as a mature artist. Published to accompany a 1998 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this book focuses on Mountains and Sea and other groundbreaking paintings of Frankenthaler's early career. In this period, Frankenthaler drew upon Cubism, the abstractions of Arshile Gorky and, especially, those of Jackson Pollock, whose radical technique inspired her to reject easel painting. Frankenthaler herself became associated with the second generation of the New York School and her unique method and experimental use of materials influenced her contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists