When a judge’s daughter, a painter in the making, saw Jackson Pollock in action at one of his ‘drippings’ in a New York gallery, she knew that her approach to the canvas would never be the same again. With that experience she gave up the easel, knelt on the floor, and set out to stretch abstract painting to its limits, not so much with gestural fury as with an embracing lyricism. To this end she invented the ‘soak-stain,’ an absorption technique whereby pigments, heavily diluted with turpentine, were applied on the medium, which imbibed them to create evocative blemishes – liquefied and translucent – around areas directly painted on. Nearly three decades after the exhibition that the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao devoted to her oeuvre during its first year of existence – at which the New Yorker herself was present – she is back in the Basque city through 28 September, this time accompanied by an exceptional entourage. After all, she had a relationship with the art critic Clement Greenberg, later married Robert Motherwell, and was a close friend of the likes of Mark Rothko, David Smith, and Anthony Caro, works by all of whom, also on display, help to give context to a personal pursuit that led her to the very depths of the color field.