Helen Frankenthaler, a New York artist whose bursts of color achieved by pouring thinned paint onto canvas from coffee cans helped point art in fresh directions after the initial post-World War IIexplosion of Abstract Expressionism, has died. She was 83.


Frankenthaler died Tuesday after a long, unspecified illness at her home in Darien, Conn., her family announced.


In 1952, the 23-year-old Frankenthaler hit upon her "soak stain" technique, achieving some of the vibrancy, lightness and pliancy of watercolor by thinning down acrylic paint and pouring it on a large, unprimed canvas spread on the floor of her Manhattan studio.


"Mountains and Sea," her breakthrough in pink, blue and green, set a style that critics — although not universally — have applauded for its lyricism and luminous use of color. Frankenthaler's stain technique influenced others such as Morris Louis, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland, giving rise to the Color Field movement of the 1950s and '60s. Come inside to read more....................