Helen Frankenthaler’s first professionally exhibited work—and her most famous—was Mountains and Sea (1952), a soak-stain painting she completed after a road trip. Frankenthaler had been to Cape Breton Island, at the northern tip of Nova Scotia, and its rugged beauty stayed with her. Though the painting is abstract, elements of the sea and coastline emerge amid strokes of blue and areas of mottled green. “My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates, and not nature per se,” she once commented, “but a feeling.” After Mountains and Sea, Frankenthaler continued to look to nature to create the color field paintings that made her famous. By the 1990s, she was working on a massive scale. This exhibition presents 12 paintings and three large works on paper from that decade. —E.C.