The current Helen Frankenthaler exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education runs chronologically, beginning, literally, with the first print she ever made, First Stone (1961). Looking at it, you wouldn’t assume it’s a print at all. No marks register as cut or etched; it’s a splashing commotion of tense primary colors and squid-ink black, talking but never quite touching. A promising start, but alone, aside from its skillful composition, it’s not terribly remarkable. In retrospect, it was the seed of a 40-year relationship with the medium, one that, separate from her monumental painting career, would forever change the process of printmaking, and the art world’s respect for it.

Starting in the 1960s, studios made an industry out of the creation of high-quality runs with premier artists. These weren’t posters or even reproductions of other works. They were drawn by the artists' own hands, originally composed for a set of editions, hopefully signed, numbered, and imbued with artists’ somatic magic. And they were abundant relative to one-off paintings, and therefore much cheaper. Many artists saw them as commodities. Frankenthaler (1928–2011) saw in printmaking an opportunity for more: to engage with the process as its own art form, a distinct medium. She made her name on her abstract expressionist paintings but was bent on upending the idea that printmaking’s reproducibility rendered it inherently lesser than other art forms.

For painters, printmaking was supposed to be an easy means of reproduction. “There were so many print studios opening in the ’60s,” says Bruce Guenther, the museum’s adjunct curator of special exhibitions, who assembled this show. The artist would draw; the studio would make a print.

Andy Warhol’s prints are a perfect example of this approach. He wanted to embrace machinery and remove himself from the process as thoroughly as possible, relishing the misaligned and bleeding prints that reflected the character of mass-production. Leonard Baskin’s scratchy, stencil-like black-and-white woodblock prints, shown in the museum’s concurrent show, The Great Birdman, are another, more traditional example. Contrasting with Frankenthaler’s prints, Guenther describes them as what a woodblock is “supposed to look like.” Frankenthaler all but sandwiched herself into the press, closing the typical gap between artist and print. 

First Stone was produced at Tatyana Grosman’s Universal Limited Art Editions, in Bay Shore, New York. Grosman once said she wanted to create prints with “the heartbeat of the artist still in it.” Her workshop is said to be where printmaking “lost its stigma as craft.” For Frankenthaler, never one to shy away from upsetting traditions, it was the perfect place to start.

She painted on the floor, famously like Jackson Pollock, and developed a method of soaking thinned paints into her canvases, a dramatic and taboo rejection of priming a canvas with a protective coat and an early sign of what became a long career of refusing to adhere to norms. Countless images of her exist online, sprawled atop a giant canvas on the floor, whipping paint and scrubbing it in with a spongy mop, cataloging energy itself. She was also a woman making art in the ’50s, which seems to have upset people most. Her moneyed upbringing and career-boosting romantic relationships—with the influential critic Clement Greenberg, the guy who “made” Jackson Pollock, and then the artist Robert Motherwell—both helped and hurt her reputation. The combination of drive, money, and connections may well have been what made her career possible.

Frankenthaler’s works aren’t actively “about” anything other than their own making. Their spontaneous creation is in line with abstract expressionist thinking. That didn’t stop others from reading narratives into them. Many interpret her works as representing a distinctly feminine beauty of the everyday; "The lipstick-traces-left-on-a-Kleenex part of life,” as the writer Adam Gopnik once put it. Others ridiculed them as unserious and domestic, suggesting her stained canvases represented menstruation. Joan Mitchell, a peer, was famously quoted calling Frankenthaler a “Kotex painter.” 

To carry the energy of spontaneity through a complicated series of plates and screens, woodblocks or hunks of limestone, seems incredibly fraught—not to mention navigating hierarchies of master printers and their militant underlings. Frankenthaler ignored this pomp and circumstance. Printers in the US, France, Mexico, and Japan wanted to print with her, and she refused to forfeit control.

She traveled the world visiting different workshops, spending countless hours editing proofs with unnerving precision and rejecting studios’ practices. She used her nails, her elbow, even her face, one printing assistant noted in a log, to manipulate the different printing materials. She clogged silk screens with crayons and sanded the edges of stones to soften her forms, responding to each layer and surface, editing spontaneously as she worked.

She once took a knife to a Japanese master printer’s woodblock, at the Shi-un-do Print Shop in Kyoto. The result is Cedar Hill (1983), a staticky plane that looks like a fax of a sweater knit from Easter-toned, variegated yarn. A stroke of oily Chrysler blue runs off the deckled edge, framing its top half with a satisfying resolve. “Thanks for your studio and generous support!” Frankenthaler scribbled in pencil next to the workshop’s stamped Kanji signature.

A favorite move was to impress large swaths of wood grain into her prints. Freefall (1992–93), a sizable print that captures every shade of blue in the ocean, foregrounds the technique. The wall text tells you it involved 40 plates—mylar, plexiglass, and mahogany blocks, pressed with 30 individual colors. But the mahogany grain is uninterrupted, as if the picture were printed on a dining room table or the back of an acoustic guitar—the result of Frankenthaler’s incessant precision, and the foil that made her organic compositions sing.

Her eye for balanced, resolved compositions was razor sharp from that first print. But the later works are freer, more thoroughly expressed. An oxblood print bisected by a squiggle in that same electric blue, Japanese Maple (2005), is almost a study of wood grain itself. It’s as if, through color, Frankenthaler articulates the grain’s compositional plot points like a sommelier telling you what to taste in a wine.

The climax of the show is a three-paneled print titled Madame Butterfly. It took three years to produce, and she finished it in 2000, when she was 72. One-hundred and two colors, 46 woodblocks (birch, maple, lauan, and fir). It has all of her tricks: thin washes of ink that threaten to keep oozing, fading in gradients over printed woodgrain; scribbles and hairline doodles nudging your eye to the lip of one form and the center of another; that unctuous terminating edge, this time on the right in a mesmerizing lavender.

A common critique is that Frankenthaler’s art isn’t “doing” anything other than being beautiful, that it’s unserious, or worse, decorative. At the least, her work is a record of the conversations she had with canvases and turpentine-thinned paints, mahogany woodblocks and silk screens. (Her materials were her only true collaborator.) At most, her oeuvre reproduces glimpses of lived moments. And isn't that great? To be a fly on the wall in that instant, transported back to a fleeting, human experience decades in the past.