“The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.”

The painter Helen Frankenthaler died December 27, 2011, in Darien, Connecticut. Obituaries by The New York Times and The Washington Post construe Frankenthaler’s importance as the inventor of a “revolutionary” soak-stain technique in which poured paint unites with the canvas; a method which made possible the Color Field movement. That similar journalistic profiles would never focus the same attention on Rembrandt’s mystifying, heterogeneous technique, or da Vinci’s departure from buon fresco in The Last Supper, evinces the extent to which art in the 20th century has been defined in terms of ideas; even ideas fastened to events as miniature and ritual as the act of pouring paint from a coffee tin.

Helen Frankenthaler entered the art world at a tender age. In 1950, at 23, she was already going down on Friday nights to The Club on East Eighth Street, meeting with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and the other members of the New York School’s Abstract Expressionist movement, and falling almost immediately into a five-year relationship with the movement’s venerable philosopher-in-residence, Clement Greenberg. But more than simply clever and precocious, Frankenthaler was well-educated, well-financed, and serious. At 20, she toured Europe’s major cities, and at twenty-one, after receiving an inheritance from her late father, a Supreme Court judge, established her own painting studio in New York City while pursuing graduate-level courses in art history at Columbia University. In the coming years, Frankenthaler would see the treasures of Europe again, this time with Greenberg, examining masterpieces in Venice, Madrid, Rome, and London.

Frankenthaler’s love of art for its own sake, and Greenberg’s insistence that art appeal to the senses, doubtless helped inflate Frankenthaler’s lucid, self-contained, style. The paintings seem to be motivated by an interest in the beauty of paint itself—particularly the blooming effects associated with “staining” the canvas—and paint’s organization on the canvas. Small’s Paradise (1964), a bilaterally symmetrical puzzle of red and green, retains the inherent, visceral, qualities of paint—its sinuous, organic, contours, its pure color—but disciplines these elements in a classical design. Continents of green, red, pink and blue organize in a top-to-bottom asymmetrical figure in which massive, four-sided shapes in the upper half of the painting fragment into more delicate forms below; the two opposing sides sustaining equilibrium through contrast, and the entire, bouncing complementary field of red and green constrained by a dark band of blue at the appropriate spatial interval. Throughout her career, Frankenthaler’s interest in painting was pure, not sustained or clouded by political or existential ambitions, and without trailing polemics. “With any picture, on paper or on canvas,” the artist said in a 2003 interview with the New York Times, “the main idea is: does it work? Is it beautiful?”

By the close of 1951, Frankenthaler had already held a one-woman exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and participated in “Ninth Street: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture,” both in New York City. In 1959, Frankenthaler’s attention to pictorial organization began to gather its proper rewards. She received first prize in the Paris Premiere Biennale for Jacob’s Ladder, a painting, which, if lacking the chromatic interest of her later work, upheld Frankenthaler’s values of form. Just ten years later, the Whitney Museum of American Art would launch a retrospective of the 41 year-old artist. Subsequent retrospectives followed in 1986, at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1998, at the Guggenheim Museum.

Frankenthaler, however, had been fortunate enough to enter the scene at an era congenial to the brighter and less philosophical products of the New York School. Her entrance coincided with a postwar spirit of optimism, the artist’s career riding the same channels as rock and roll. The work of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, contemporaries of Frankenthaler and the first and most famous actors of Abstraction Expressionism, had been nourished differently. All three had survived the spiritual and social assaults of two world wars, and both Newman and Rothko had, with their art, attempted to build an insulating system against them. Rothko claimed his solemn, economical canvases conveyed “tragedy, ecstasy” and “doom,” and that “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” But the painters’ existential defenses were not incorruptible. By the time Frankenthaler met Pollock in the early Fifties, his classic drip technique had already begun to subside, and he had resumed his alcoholism. In 1970 Rothko’s career would end with his death by suicide just as Frankenthaler’s work was ascending to maturity.

What impact Frankenthaler’s work has had on American painting is often summarized in a single anecdote. In the spring of 1953, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, two painters from Washington D.C., took the train into Manhattan to visit Clement Greenberg. Coincidentally, Frankenthaler’s studio held the recently completed Mountains and Sea; a stain-painted, nine-feet-wide canvas inspired by watercolors she had made on the Canadian coast.

Pollock’s drip technique had already attained philosophical importance for theorist-critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg—Rosenberg construing Pollock’s trope as giving rise to “not a picture but an event” (Greenberg disagreed)—and technique had been raised to the proportions of an idea; technique no longer the handmaid to works of art, but works of theory. In this highly oxygenated universe, little 24 year-old Frankenthaler’s idea, her concept of paint poured onto unprimed canvas, exploded like a match. Frankenthaler, Morris Louis declared, “became a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

In one sense, the lavish attention paid to this event is unfortunate. It is true that Frankenthaler’s “invention” indirectly launched the careers of Louis and Noland who adopted it, and became the foundation of the Color Field movement; a movement comprising paintings, which, like Frankenthaler’s, were mostly luminous and stained. But to the extent that Frankenthaler’s soak-staining technique is praised for itself—as an idea—Frankenthaler’s true legacy is obscured. It is doubtful the artist would have regarded the technique as important—except in the classical sense of enabling a particular variety of beauty. Frankenthaler was always mainly interested in the formal relationships which Rothko dismissed as being not “the point.” Frankenthaler’s paintings, although perhaps lacking the imagination of Rothko’s misty, sublime work, is not constrained by allegiance to a particular mood or theory, and therefore free to radically change form with each instantiation. Frankenthaler never embraced the “moral and metaphysical” justifications of her circle because, of course, she simply refused them. The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.

Amanda Johnson studies painting and philosophy and teaches a course on “the art of looking at Art” in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work can be found elsewhere including the online arts journal “The Curator”.