Helen Frankenthaler (American, B.1928), a widely acclaimed member of the New York School and a leading figure of second-generation abstract expressionists, is considered to be one of the most significant American artists working today. She is often credited as one of the founders and giants of the Color Field School of painting. Frankenthaler attended the Dalton School, where she studied with the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. After attending Bennington College in Vermont, she returned to New York to establish herself among the New York avant-garde. In 1950 she met the formalist art critic Clement Greenberg, who proved instrumental in acquainting Frankenthaler with leading figures in the New York art world including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffman, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Motherwell (who she later married). Like them, she was interested in transforming elements of nature into abstract shapes and color. Her career launched in 1952 with the exhibition of her innovative "soak stain" paintings. For these works, she diluted oil paint with turpentine or kerosene so that the color would soak into her unprepared canvas. The resulting effect gives the canvas a dreamlike halo around each area where she applied the paint. For a number of her contemporaries, soak-staining replaced the thickly painted, gestural strokes of action painting. This pouring technique created abstract fields, or shapes of color, that achieved an unprecedented dynamism. Frankenthaler's stained paintings, based on real or imaginary landscapes epitomize her art. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s she continued to explore the use of large abstract forms and rich color in her canvases. In 1961 she also began experimenting with printmaking and illustrated books, and is now considered to be one of the great printmakers of her generation. She brought an unprescedented innovation to her editions as she incorporates multiple media into a single composition including woodcut, lithography, etching and acquatint. Her editions are in many prestigious museum and private collections. In addition to teaching at New York, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, Frankenthaler has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1989. Her paintings and prints are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Tate Modern, London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to name a few. Enormously influential to future generations of abstract artists, her techniques in both paint and printmaking are highly revered.