Colour-field Painting

Color field painting is a stylistic term to describe the work of certain first-generation abstract expressionists of the postwar era, such as Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980). Second-generation "post-painterly" abstractionists include Morris Louis (1912–1962), Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), and Jules Olitski (1922–2007). Color field painting is distinguished by the use of simplified shapes and forms to express complex, often Platonic ideals; a preference for an extremely expansive scale; an "all-over" surface that conceivably extends beyond the four edges of the painting; and uniform areas of color as a means to assert the flatness of the picture plane. Color field painting came to prominence in the 1950s and 60s almost exclusively through the Marxist (and later formalist) art criticism of Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), an editor for the intellectual left-wing Partisan Review (1940–1942), and art critic for the Nation (1942–1949).

Brief History

Among the first American critics to champion New York school painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Rothko, Newman, and Still, Greenberg analyzed these works in historical relationship to European avant-garde easel painting, namely as they achieved in departing from the paradigm of analytical and synthetic cubism in the hands of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In staking a claim for what ultimately shattered the previously dominant European mold—with its dependence upon recognizable subject matter and the human figure—Greenberg asserted that modernist painting in America should concern itself only with the formal qualities of surface, such as flatness, or the dissolution of depth perspective first established in Renaissance painting; radically simplified and yet muscular compositions; and an ambitious scale, what critic and art historian Leo Steinberg (1920– ) would later term "flat-bed painting." Greenberg, his follower Michael Fried (1939– ), and poet/critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)—who invented the term action painting to describe the gestural brushwork and spontaneous handling of paint in de Kooning and Pollock—considered the term abstract expressionism as too limited to fully describe modern American painting from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Certain practitioners, for example, Pollock, de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky, retained a post-cubist, expressionistic, almost baroque style, without relinquishing aspects of the European tradition. So while Color field painting made use of many of the idioms of abstract expressionism, it departed stylistically in many ways, charting a course for what Greenberg considered "advanced" painting in the United States.

A philosophy of color field painting—which omits the energetic chaos of action painting, typically deemphasizing the mark of the artist’s hand—issued from a series of writings by critics and the artists themselves. In his posthumously published treatise The Artist’s Reality, Russian-born Mark Rothko argued for a "pure plasticity" of painting, eliminating all references to external reality, in order to create an existential experience that relied on optical and sensitive contemplation on the part of the observer. Bold, shimmering, scumbled layers of color in rectangular strata hovered on the surface of unprimed canvasses, all untitled and numbered. By paring away the surrealist biomorphism of his early work, his soft, geometric color fields allowed for a transcendental experience for the initiated viewer, communicating private, timeless myths. Rothko saw his abstract shapes as dramatic, organic "performers," moving with an "internal freedom" without direct association to the visible world.

Barnett Newman, who studied both art history and philosophy, polemically asserted that a complete break from the narratives of cubism would distinguish the new American avant-garde. His massive, typically heroic, color field pictures (such as Onement I [1948] and Vir heroicus sublimis [1950–51]) comprise luminous, spatial fields punctuated by thin, vertical stripes (or "zips," in his words) meant to evoke purely perceptual situations, albeit tinted with associations of the philosophical sublime, the book of Genesis, and American transcendentalism.

Clement Greenberg, in his essay "‘American-Type’ Painting" (1955), identified not only Newman but Clyfford Still as the most original painters of the era for creating a unique vocabulary of forms. Born and raised in Washington state and Alberta, Canada, Still’s massive, utterly flat coloristic experiments, dryly painted with jagged, wandering margins, are tough, austere pictures alluding to unyielding landscapes, both flat plains and monumental cliff formations. His color palette comprised rich, earthy harmonies of dark blues, blacks, browns, golds, and rust, and his mature work was entirely free of decipherable symbols. Still saw his paintings as operations of consciousness, outside of time and place, and wrote very little about his own painting, and while he moved to New York in 1945, he saw himself as an outsider to any particular movement or "school" of art.

The work of the aforementioned artists were viewed with distaste by the general public, and they were not immediately embraced by powerful institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art. The growing influence of Greenberg and a number of gallerists, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Samuel Koontz, Betty Parsons, rapidly and irrevocably changed that landscape.

Impact

In 1950, American-born painter and printmaker Helen Frankenthalermet Greenberg, Pollock, Lee Krasner, and de Kooning in New York, where she quickly mastered important technical breakthroughs in color field painting. Extending Pollock’s physical method of swirling and spattering paint onto unprimed canvas placed directly on the floor, Frankenthaler eliminated brushstrokes, allowing the play of thinned, poured pigments to seep into large, effusive areas of color, a technique that extinguished the illusion of three dimensional perspective in that the visible texture of the canvas and colors fused on a single plane. Her pictures called attention to the material and the nature of the medium, an approach that would be later be termed Greenbergian formalism and would dominate art historical thinking about vanguard modernism in the United States for decades. While she often employed narrative titles (Mountain and Sea, 1952; Jacob’s Ladder, 1957) Frankenthaler’s lyrical compositions remained resolutely abstract and ambiguous chromatic fields evocative of timeless, natural forms.

Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland—known as the Washington Color Painters because they were based in the nation’s capital—saw Frankenthaler’s work and began pursuing similar techniques of staining and juxtaposing washes or fields of color while avoiding some of the existential dramas of abstract expressionism. Louis worked with thin layers, creating subtle scrims of hue in making serial pictures, typically larger in scale than Frankenthaler’s. His Veils (1954), Veils II (1958–9), Unfurleds (1959–61), and Stripes (1961–2) were included in an exhibition titled Post-Painterly Abstraction, organized by Michael Fried at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. Noland, also included in that landmark show along with Frank Stella (1936– ), departed from the pouring technique, preferring to spray and soak his canvasses with pigments, an approach that suggested a cooler, more objective stance. His often symmetrical pictures centered on targets and chevron patterns. This lent Noland’s work a graphic quality that shifted away from the all-over composition while still focused on the goal of pure opticality over tactile experience. Unlike their predecessors who used oil paints, Louis, Noland, and Olitski preferred synthetic paints, such as acrylics and automobile enamels, a choice that eventually identified them with hard-edged op art of the mid-to-late 1960s.

The impact of second-generation color field painting was critical in emphasizing formal procedures over metaphysical and philosophical investigations, an approach that led many artists to turn to the possibilities of op and pop art and minimalism. Many of these artists were deeply engaged with critical theory and began to blur the line between high art and "low" popular culture. The strict, formalist criticism of Greenberg and Fried came to be perceived as both doctrinaire and limiting, creating in essence, new considerations of the postmodern in both painting and sculpture. The post-abstract expressionist decades would turn markedly to interdisciplinary ways of thinking, engaging with literary theory, structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and deconstruction.

Bibliography

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Crow, Thomas, and Glenn Phillips, eds. Seeing Rothko: Issues and Debates. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2005. Print.

Elderfield, John. Morris Louis. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986. Print.

Fried, Michael. "Three American Painters." Art and Objecthood. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print.

Greenberg, Clement. "‘American-Type’ Painting." Partisan Review. 22.2 (Spring 1955): 179–196. Reprinted in Art in America: 1945–1970, ed. Jed Perl. New York: Library of America, 2014. Print.

Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting." Arts Yearbook 1 (1961). Reprinted in Art in America: 1945–1970, ed. Jed Perl. New York: Library of America, 2014. Print.

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Waldman, Diane. Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1977. Print.