Helen Frankenthaler

Although greatly influenced by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and others, she soon developed her own approach to painting. She treated each painting as a new work that had its own unique requirements. She started experimenting with stain painting, where an unstretched and unprimed canvas lying on the floor would be treated with heavily diluted oilt-based paints to be soaked directly into the fabric. She created silky pools of color that, although abstract, evoked images of landscapes. As Whitney Chadwick said of Frankenthaler, "She was not the first artist to stain canvases but she was the firsy to develop a complete formal vocabulary from the technique." Her techniques influenced other artists, especially Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Frankenthaler is significant to the 1950s because of her contributions to Abstract Expressionism. As the name suggests, this form of art is important in any understanding of the Fifties because it combines abstraction and expressionism. Expressionism itself emphasizes the emotional responses from both the artist and the viewer. The voices of a new America as heard in authors such as Jack Keroauc and Allen Ginsberg are seen in artists such as Frankenthaler. It is also important that Frankenthaler, as a woman, steps beyond the traditional gender roles. Helen Frankenthaler is nonconformist both in her art and life.

Biography from artinthepicture.com



Helen Frankenthaler - Causeway


Helen Frankenthaler - Orange Underline


Helen Frankenthaler - Nightmare



Helen Frankenthaler - Coalition

Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell is perhaps best known as a second-generation member of the New York School. Yet although she was included in the celebrated 1957 exhibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation at the Jewish Museum in New York, Mitchell lived and worked primarily in France. While her dramatic, lushly painted works possess an active, gestural quality that connects her work to New York School artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, her work also evokes the paintings and pastels of French Impressionists through their vivid palette and frequent references to nature. As her work incorporated both of these influences, Mitchell is frequently termed an Abstract Impressionist. Such an association is reinforced by the fact that Mitchell work primarily out of Vétheuil, a town outside of Paris where Claude Monet lived and worked, and in a strange twist of fate, that she also lived on Avenue Claude Monet.

Biography from hollistaggart.com

Joan Mitchell - Barge Peniche


Joan Mitchell - Garden Party


Joan Mitchell - La Grande Vallée


Joan Mitchell - (title unknown)


Joan Mitchell - Untitled


Joan Mitchell - Untitled

John Nash - The Cornfield

This is on display at the Tate Britain at the moment, go down and check it out!