Open wall

Helen Frankenthaler made this work using a technique she practically invented, called soak-staining. Instead of layering thick paint onto a canvas, she thinned her colors way down and poured them directly onto unprimed fabric. The paint sank into the threads like dye into cloth, leaving these soft, washy shapes that almost look like watercolor blown up to a giant scale. You can see the canvas breathing through the color here, with blues, pinks, and warm earthy tones drifting across the surface like weather moving over a landscape.

When she painted this in 1953, Frankenthaler was only in her mid-twenties, but her ideas would go on to shape a whole generation of artists. Painters like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland saw her staining method and called it a bridge between the bold gestures of Jackson Pollock and what came next. The title "Open Wall" fits the feeling of the piece, since the forms never quite close up or settle into anything solid. They stay loose and open, inviting you to find your own shapes in the drifting fields of color.