Red & Yellow Sun With Smooth Yellow Field

These works are made after those of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), whose career spanned six decades and has been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. Through her invention of the soak-stain technique, in which paints were diluted with turpentine that allowed the colors to soak directly into the canvas, she expanded the possibilities of abstract painting, while at times referencing figuration and landscape. Frankenthaler is identified with the use of fluid shapes, abstract masses, and lyrical gestures. The artist began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s, officially launching her artistic career with "Mountains and Sea" in 1952. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Her work continued to change throughout the years: In the 1960s, she explored symmetry; beginning in 1963, Frankenthaler began to use acrylic paints which allowed for opacity and sharpness on the canvas. By the 1970s, she had abandoned the soak stain technique, preferring thicker paint that allowed her to employ bright colors. Throughout the 1970s, Frankenthaler explored the joining of areas of the canvas through the use of modulated hues, and experimented with large, abstract forms. Her work in the 1980s was characterized as much calmer, using muted colors and relaxed brushwork. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.