Helen Frankenthaler

A protean abstract expressionist painter, Helen Frankenthaler can be tender and delicate, powerfully archetypal, explosively lyrical, quietly introspective or mystically transcendental. Her splashy, symbol-laden Eden (1956) seems to conjure up the gates of paradise itself. Her loose, evocative 1950s style, a synthesis of Gorky, de Kooning and Pollock, gave way to '60s color-field experiments a la Mark Rothko, followed by witty, complex, ambivalent metaphors of the '70s and explorations in ceramic tile, steel or clay sculpture, and works on paper. Director of drawings at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Elderfield provides the most thorough survey of Frankenthaler's stylistic growth to date in this huge, sumptuous album. She can pack more meaning into one daub of color than do many artists into an entire canvas, and this volume's platesof incomparable qualityrender visible the texture and hue of the paint. Well over half of the 400 illustrations are in color. (Mar.)