Remembering the pioneering American abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler on what would have been her ninety-second birthday. Here she is captured by the great Gordon Parks for Life Magazine in 1956. She sits in her New York studio, surrounded floor to ceiling by her masterfully coloured paintings, made using an experimental technique she dubbed the “soak stain”. This involved thinning paint with turpentine or water and pouring it onto a flat canvas in swathes so that it soaked into the fabric. “What concerns me is, did I make a beautiful picture?” Frankenthaler once said of her hopes for her work—and there’s no denying that she succeeded.
