Published by Gagosian, this is the ultimate book on legendary painter Helen Frankenthaler. Taking the artist’s 1950s New York debut as its starting point, “The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler, edited by Katy Siegel, follows Frankenthaler’s own painting practice as well as the immediate influence of her work on other artists, tracing artistic currents gathered under her name as they move outward in different directions over time.

“A line, color, shapes, spaces, all do one thing for and within themselves, and yet do something else, in relation to everything that is going on within the four sides [of the canvas]. A line is a line, but [also] is a color. . . . It does this here, but that there. The canvas surface is flat and yet the space extends for miles. What a lie, what trickery—how beautiful is the very idea of painting.”
—Helen Frankenthaler

The book features scholarly essays, texts from contemporary artists, and reprints of historical writing from seventeen authors, including John Elderfield, Suzanne Hudson, and Laura Owens, as well as Siegel. These texts are interwoven with a visual chronology documenting over seven decades of key works, performances, publications, and cultural ephemera. It’s one of this Summer’s must-read.