Born in 1928, Helen Frankenthaler was only 23 when Clement Greenberg introduced her work to New York's Abstract Expressionist painters. Her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea (1952) served as an immediate catalyst for the Color Field painting of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland and marked the origin of her groundbreaking work in Color Staining. In this technique, inspired by Pollack's drip method and de Kooning's improvisations, she poured thinned paint across immense horizontal canvases and stained her color washes into the fabric without building up thick layers of paint.

Her paintings and prints have been shown in major exhibitions around the world and she has been honored with numerous retrospectives, including "Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1989 and "Helen Frankenthaler: Prints" at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1993. In 1998, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, presented "After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler, 1956-1959," which later traveled to the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.