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De Stijl was a modern art movement from the Netherlands focused on structural and visual simplicity

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At first glance, it's hard to know what to make of Helen Frankenthaler's heaving, atmospheric painting, The Bay.

Is its subject what the title suggests-a landform of some kind with certain emblematic associations? Is the swelling amorphous blue mass floating amid that moss green and cream border meant to stand for something beyond itself? With many Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s and 60s, it's important not to get too caught up with possible social and historical contexts and biography, but to focus on what's before us-the physical elements of the work itself because those elements can tell us so much about the painting.

When Helen Frankenthaler painted The Bay, she was already a well-regarded artist. She'd been the subject of a LIFE Magazine profile in 1956 and was one of the handful of women among the traditional all-boys' club of the New York Abstract Expressionists. The Bay was chosen as one of the paintings for the American pavilion of the 1966 Venice Biennale. Looking closely you can see that the shades of blues that run into one another are part of a specific process of pouring paint on to the canvas rather than painting the colors onto the surface with a brush, as the leading Abstract Expressionist painters, like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, were so famous for doing.

Frankenthaler's approach here was to use a soak-stain method with diluted acrylic paint. Acrylics gave her more flexibility with viscosity and movement than oils, and allowed her more control as she poured that thinned paint onto the taut unprimed canvas so that it would get absorbed into the weave of the fabric. As a substitute for the action of the brush, Frankenthaler would lift the canvas and tilt it at various angles so that the paint would flow across the surface. She had to account for gravity and the ebb and flow of a liquid across a flat surface, so a fascinating aspect of Frankenthaler's method is the blend of the artist's control paired with the unpredictability of the forces of nature.

This kind of painting is often classified as Color Field painting, painting characterized by simplicity of line and a focus on color as the subject rather than as an add-on. The first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were the first important Color Field painters, while Helen Frankenthaler is often classified as a second-generation member of the group.

Frankenthaler was inspired by the drip method of Jackson Pollock who began painting on the floor in the late 1940s, but she knew she wanted to work differently. Pollock and other artists such as de Kooning and Franz Kline had made the painted gesture too famous and recognizable by the early 1950s. In 1952, at the age of 23, Frankenthaler's experiments lead her to produce her first major painting, Mountains and Sea, an expansive luminous depiction of the landscape of Nova Scotia, where she'd recently taken a holiday.

Mountains and Sea in turn inspired other painters to use this soak-stain method to great success, painters like Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Paul Feeley, whose canvases of floating thinned color heralded in a new era of abstract painting. The sense of natural spontaneity and devotion to color is part of what makes The Bay and the work of the Color Field painters so compelling. The basic formal elements of a painting speak for themselves as the viewer experiences the work in a fundamental, direct manner.

The influential mid-20th century art critic, Clement Greenberg, a close friend of Frankenthaler (and Pollock), believed that if art made after the trauma of the second world war was going to have any real impact on the social consciousness of Americans it would have to radically change and move towards the abstract. For Greenberg, abstraction could reach a more universal and expansive mode of visual communication.

In a 1965 interview for Artforum Magazine with the art critic Henry Geldzahler, Helen Frankenthaler described her process of conceptualizing her work:

"When you first saw a Cubist or Impressionist picture there was a whole way of instructing the eye or the subconscious. Dabs of color had to stand for real things. It was an abstraction of a guitar or a hillside. The opposite is going on now. If you have bands of blue, green and pink, the mind doesn't think sky, grass and flesh. These are colors and the question is what are they doing with themselves and with each other. Sentiment and nuance are being squeezed out." Helen Frankenthaler [1]

That last sentence, "sentiment and nuance are being squeezed out," is crucial. The colors on the canvas don't have to represent something in particular, but can have a more ambiguous, emblematic quality for the viewer. The basic act of responding to color, the way one would respond to a sunset, or to light from a stained-glass window, simplicity and pure emotion through clarity of color and form.

The same year she painted The Bay, Frankenthaler painted a series of similar soak-stain paintings with titles referring to water and geography: Canal, Low Tide, Blue Tide, inspired by the landscape of her country home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. As Frankenthaler said, it's important for us not to be too encumbered by context and speculation when we look at her work. We're to take from it what we will on our own terms.

[1] Henry Geldzahler, "An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler," Artforum Magazine 4, no. 2 (1965): pp. 36-38.

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Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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The term was originally applied to the work from about 1950 of three American abstract expressionist painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. 'The colour field painters' was the title of the chapter dealing with these artists in the American scholar Irvine Sandler's ground-breaking history, Abstract Expressionism, published in 1970.

From around 1960 a more purely abstract form of colour field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam and others. It differed from abstract expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gestural application associated with it. In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with this development was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term often also used to describe the work of the 1960 generation and their successors.

In Britain there was a major development of colour field painting in the 1960s in the work of Robyn Denny, John Hoyland, Richard Smith and others.

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The term was originally applied to the work from about 1950 of three American abstract expressionist painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. 'The colour field painters' was the title of the chapter dealing with these artists in the American scholar Irvine Sandler's ground-breaking history, Abstract Expressionism, published in 1970.

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To experiment on your own, take our online studio course Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting or learn more about the art of this time in the online history course Modern and Contemporary Art: 1945-1989.

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Explore the complex veils of color that form Mark Rothko's abstract paintings. To experiment on your own, take our online studio course Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting.

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The Painting Techniques of Jackson Pollock

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Learn about the drip-style painting techniques of one of America's most iconic and influential painters.

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#2 Franz Kline-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#2 Franz Kline-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#2 Willem de Kooning-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#2 Willem de Kooning-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#2 Mark Rothko-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#2 Mark Rothko-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#2 Jackson Pollack-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#2 Jackson Pollack-Describe the Formal qualities of this painting using appropriate visual arts vocabulary

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#1 Watch this Video showcasing the Abstract Expressionist Movement

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#1 Watch this Video showcasing the Abstract Expressionist Movement

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AB EX NY: MoMA and Abstract Expressionism

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Take the online course Modern and Contemporary Art: 1945-1989 to find out what happens next or experiment with Abstract Expressionist painting techniques in the online course, Materials and Techniques of Postwar painting.