In the summer of 1953, Helen Frankenthaler boarded a ship destined for Spain. Leaving behind family, friends, her lover Clement Greenberg, and, most crucially, the roiling New York artworld, she hoped to breathe new air, absorb fresh influences, and discover where she, as a painter, had come from, in order to embark upon the next phase of her artistic journey. The timing of her trip, however, was both curious and poignant.

The previous fall, at the tender age of 23, Frankenthaler had created a work of art so original that it would inspire a new school of painting. Tacking a 220 by 298.8 cm piece of raw canvas onto her studio floor, she thinned oil paint to a liquid and poured it onto the fabric, allowing the colors to merge and puddle as she guided the ooze with her hands, her arms, her whole body – at times, hovering over the painting, at others, crawling onto it. Standing up to look at what she had created, Frankenthaler admitted she was surprised. Spread out below her, was an abstract image that didn’t sit atop the canvas, it floated, weightless, through the weave.

Her painting Mountains and Sea (1952) would be to the Color Field school of the later 1950s what Jackson Pollock’s so-called drip paintings were to the Abstract Expressionists. Both artists’ breakthroughs pointed a way forward for colleagues ready to move beyond 20th-century European Modernism. But while Pollock’s discovery had been heralded by his fellow artists, Frankenthaler’s was greeted with hostility by her peers and confusion by the art press when it was exhibited in January 1953 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.

The response disturbed Frankenthaler. Rather than challenge her outright, artists and writers she counted as friends engaged in a whisper campaign of criticism. Except for Larry Rivers. In a letter to Frankenthaler, written about a month after her opening, he asked her to explain the apparent lack of conflict and struggle in her work, implying that it was too hastily conceived, too easy, as he imagined her life outside the studio to be.

In her epistolary response, Frankenthaler eagerly defended herself and in so doing, anticipated a debate that would bedevil the artworld into the next decades as Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop and Op and Minimalism. Frankenthaler asked, if a work shouldn’t be ‘looked at and judged as a painting whether there be 10 strokes to an inch or just a whisper of a stroke to a foot?’ Must an artist show their struggle through brushstrokes, erasures, and smears? In short, must artistic expression be so obvious?

Frankenthaler thought not, but the artworld at that moment wasn’t ready to accept her thesis or her work. Telling Rivers, ‘The atmosphere stinks lately and I want out,’ she quit the gallery where she had had two solo shows (while artists twice her age still awaited their first exhibition) and left for Europe.

The current Helen Frankenthaler retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the largest European exhibition of her work to date, demonstrates – in more than 50 works covering six decades – the artist’s path of discovery and the enormous influence the continent’s art and culture had on her development. Like Abstract Expressionism itself, she was born in the United States but she was the offspring of a great European tradition.

Europe had been present in Frankenthaler’s life since her childhood in New York. Her mother was a German-Jewish immigrant with family stuck in Germany as the Nazi plan for the Jewish population there became terrifyingly clear. Helen was 14 years old when the news that family members had taken their own lives rather than submit to the Nazi machine descended upon the household like a shroud. Six years later, in 1948, she took her first trip to Europe, the still war-ravaged continent that she knew as the birthplace of the culture she loved but also as the scene of the horrors she feared. Those very polarities – beauty and darkness – would characterize her work throughout her life. It is perhaps no coincidence then that it was on returning from that first trip that she committed her life to painting. ‘I would do what I did and take it from here,’ she said, 20 years later in an interview for the Archives of American Art.

At Bennington College in Vermont, Frankenthaler’s introduction to the art of the past had involved, primarily, 20th-century European Modernism – Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky. She learned those lessons well. So well, in fact, that when she moved back to New York in 1949, she was primed for the maelstrom that she encountered with Willem de Kooning, Pollock, and Lee Krasner exploding the canvas and giving birth to Abstract Expressionism. Faced with this fresh challenge, Frankenthaler produced accomplished works bearing the marks of the new movement in paintings such as Untitled (on 21st Street), The Sightseers, and Village (all 1951).

But she, and some of her young colleagues, had begun to feel that they needed to travel much deeper into art history in order to advance their own revolutionary pathways. That meant trips to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and, in Frankenthaler’s case, travels in Europe where she absorbed the poetry of darkness that she found in Rembrandt and Édouard Manet; Claude Monet’s vision, in which land and sea are one and interchangeable; and the veiled mystery created by Titian with a mere whisper of paint breathed across the canvas. In the coming years, she would use all those lessons in her work: For E.M., Mediterranean (both 1981), and Portrait of a Lady in White (1979), among them.

When Frankenthaler resurfaced in New York in 1953 after the schism over Mountains and Sea, she did so, rejuvenated by her travels, which had included a front-row seat at a bull fight, days at the Prado and the Cave of Altamira, nights drinking cognac with European artists, an immersion in the landscape of Spain, and an increasing awareness of a pace of life that allowed time for appreciation. Strengthened and inspired, she declared herself ready to rejoin the gallery and, more crucially, ready to continue her work – her work, not the work others thought she should make. Playful, sexual, violent, beautiful, even ugly, she would confound and challenge, and she would be whatever she wanted to be, eventually, in whatever medium she chose – canvas, metal, block prints, and textiles.

That early soul-searching European journey was one she would take repeatedly in the coming decades, usually amid artistic or personal turmoil: In 1954 after her mother’s suicide; in 1956 after breaking free the previous year from Greenberg’s increasingly unhinged grip; in 1958 to celebrate her marriage to the artist Robert Motherwell; in 1959 to collect the first prize in painting at the inaugural Paris Biennale; and in 1972 to make sculpture in Anthony Caro’s London studio after her divorce from Motherwell in 1971.

The artist’s work can be viewed as a virtual travelogue of her experiences: The landscape that appears in paintings such as Lorelei (1957), inspired by a trip down the Rhine; the architecture, as celebrated in Giralda (1956) after seeing the bell tower of Seville cathedral. But most importantly, and most deeply felt, are her life and spirit as an American daughter of Europe. This combination infuses all her work and is where Helen Frankenthaler – artist – can be found.