Helen Frankenthaler, 1928–2011

Helen Frankenthaler died today. I savor her paintings, their creamy, bleeding colors, the free, mysterious, intuitive way she made them.

From the New York Times obit:

Critics have not unanimously praised Ms. Frankenthaler’s art. Some have seen it as thin in substance, uncontrolled in method, too sweet in color and too “poetic.” But it has been far more apt to garner admirers like the critic Barbara Rose, who wrote in 1972 of Ms. Frankenthaler’s gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions.”

Here she is in 1957, in a photo I found here.