painting - Color Field
Photograph by Franck Réthoréon Flickr.
painting />From 1929 to 1933, Louis studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (now Maryland Institute College of Art). Color field painters efface the individual mark in favor of large, flat, stained and soaked areas of color, considered painting Paint to be the essential nature of visual abstraction along with the actual shape of the canvas, which Frank Stella in particular achieved in unusual ways with combinations of curved and straight edges.
Alluding to several of his own series of paintings that reflect Matisse s influence, most notably his Open Series that come closest to classic Color Field painting. Barnett Newman is considered one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. Some painters who effectively used spray painting techniques include Jules Olitski, who was a pioneer in his spray technique that covered his large paintings with layer after layer of different colors, often gradually changing hue and value in subtle progression.
Living in Washington, D.C., somewhat apart from the New York scene and working almost in isolation. Two pictures he saw there reverberate in almost every Ocean Park canvas.
Jack Bush tended to do both horizontal and vertical stripe paintings as well as angular ones. Magna, a special artist use acrylic paint was developed by Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden in 1947 and reformulated in 1960, specifically for Morris Louis and other stain painters of the color field movement. In 1972, former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said: Color field, curiously enough or perhaps not, became a viable way of painting at exactly the time that acrylic paint, the new plastic paint, came into being. Another critical view advanced by Clement Greenberg connects Pollock s allover canvasses to the large-scale Water Lilies of Claude Monet done during the 1920s.
Pollock asked to be tested by the same eye that could see how good Raphael was when he was good or Piero when he was good. By the late 1950s and early 1960s young artists began to break away stylistically from abstract expressionism; experimenting with new ways of making pictures; and new ways of handling paint and color. He invited them up to New York in 1953, I think it was, to Helen s studio to see a painting that she had just done called Mountains and Sea, a very, very beautiful painting, which was in a sense, out of Pollock and out of Gorky.
Miró in turn displays lively interest in their work and never misses an opportunity to encourage and support them. Greenberg, art critic Michael Fried and others have observed that the overall feeling in Pollock s most famous works - his drip paintings read as vast fields of built up linear elements often reading as vast complexes of similar valued paint skeins that read as all over fields of color and drawing, and are related to the mural sized late Monet s that are constructed of many passages of close valued brushed and scumbled marks that also read as close valued fields of color and drawing that Monet used in building his picture surfaces.
Noland attended the experimental Black Mountain College and studied art in his home state of North Carolina. For Rothko, color was merely an instrument. In a sense, his best known works – the multiforms and his other signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression, albeit one of purer (or less concrete or definable, depending on your interpretation) means, which is that of the same basic human emotions, as his earlier surrealistic mythological paintings.
The basic point about Louis s work and that of other Color Field painters, sometimes known as the Washington Color School in contrast to most of the other new approaches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is that they greatly simplified the idea of what constitutes the look of a finished painting. Kenneth Noland working in Washington, DC., was also a pioneer of the color field movement in the late 1950s who used series as important formats for his paintings. In pursuing this direction of modern art, these artists wanted to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image often within series of related types. In distinction to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and paint handling of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Color Field painting initially appeared to be cool and austere.
Late 19th century Americans like Augustus Vincent Tack and Albert Pinkham Ryder along with early American Modernists like Georgia O Keeffe, Marsden Hartley Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove and Milton Avery s landscapes also provided important precedents and were influences on the Abstract Expressionists, the Color Field painters and the Lyrical Abstractionists. He couldn t make them out.
It initially referred to a particular type of abstract expressionism, especially the work of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and several series of paintings by Joan Miró. All were moving in a new direction away from the violence and anxiety of Action painting toward a new and seemingly calmer language of color. Although the term Color Field is associated with Clement Greenberg, Greenberg actually preferred to use the term Post-Painterly Abstraction.
His shaped canvases of the 1960s like Harrah II, 1967, revolutionized abstract painting. Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are called Adam and Eve (see Adam and Eve), and there is also Uriel (1954) and Abraham (1949), a very dark painting, which as well as being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of Newman s father, who had died in 1947.
He was a member of Painters Eleven, the group founded by William Ronald in 1954 to promote abstract painting in Canada, and was soon encouraged in his art by the American art critic Clement Greenberg. There s no interruption, there s no mutation here.
Although Newman s paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at specific subjects being addressed, often with a Jewish theme. Denying connection to Abstract Expressionism or any other Art Movement Mark Rothko spoke clearly about his paintings in 1956: I am not an abstractionist .
I m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions. When he returned to painting in the Bay Area in mid-1965 his resulting works summed up all that he had learned from his more than a decade as a leading figurative painter.
Some of his best known series are the Unfurleds, the Veils, the Florals and the Stripes or Pillars. Another important innovation was Dan Christensen s use of a spray technique to great effect in loops and ribbons of bright color; sprayed in clear, calligraphic marks across his large-scale paintings.
Art critic Clement Greenberg perceived Color Field painting as related to but different from Action painting. An important distinction that made color field painting different from abstract expression was the paint handling. During the period between the fall 1964 and the spring of 1965 Diebenkorn traveled throughout Europe, he was granted a cultural visa to visit and view Henri Matisse paintings in important Soviet museums.
She is one of the originators of the Color Field movement that emerged in the late 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists.
It has to do with shape, It has to do with feelings which are more difficult to get at. Jack Bush was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter, born in Toronto, Ontario in 1909. There he also studied Bauhaus theory and color with Josef Albers In 1948 and 1949 he worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and in the early 1950s met Morris Louis in Washington DC. In 1970 art critic Clement Greenberg said: I d place Pollock along with Hofmann and Morris Louis in this country among the very greatest painters of this generation.
What is common among these stylistic innovations is a concern for tragedy, ecstasy and doom. By 1958, whatever spiritual expression Rothko meant to portray on canvas, it was growing increasingly darker. One of the most important characteristics of Stella s paintings is his use of repetition.
In 1964, Clement Greenberg curated an influential exhibition that traveled the country called Post-painterly abstraction. In 1970 painter Jules Olitski said: I don t know what Color Field painting means. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings using color.
Color Field painting is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas; creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point! Joan Miró was one of the first and most successful stain painters.
While younger artists like Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Ronnie Landfield, Dan Christensen, began with Post-Painterly Abstraction and eventually moved forward towards a new type of expressionism, referred to as Lyrical Abstraction. In 1970 artist Helen Frankenthaler commented about her use of staining: When I first started doing the stain paintings, I left large areas of canvas unpainted, I think, because the canvas itself acted as forcefully and as positively as paint or line or color.
Pollock s use of all over composition lend a philosophical and a physical connection to the way the color field painters like Newman, Rothko and Still construct their unbroken and in Still s case broken surfaces. Water soluble Liquitex and Aquatec proved to be ideally suited for stain painting.
Many of the artists mentioned as well as many others have practiced all three modes at one phase of their careers or another. Some of the new styles and movements that appeared in the early 1960s as responses to abstract expressionism were called: Washington Color School, Hard-edge painting, Geometric abstraction, Minimalism and Color Field. Gene Davis also was a painter known especially for paintings of vertical stripes of color, like Black Grey Beat, 1964, and he also was a member of the group of abstract painters in Washington DC during the 1960s known as the Washington Color School.
Color field painting came in at the same time as the invention of this new paint. Acrylics were first made commercially available in the 1950s as mineral spirit-based paints called Magna offered by Leonard Bocour. It also was one of the first stain pictures, one of the first large field pictures in which the stain technique was used, perhaps the first one.
During the same period of the late 1960s early 1970s in Europe, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and several other painters also began producing works of intense expression, merging abstraction with images, incorporating landscape imagery and figuration that by the late 1970s was referred to as Neo-expressionism. The following is a list of Color Field painters, closely related artists, and some of their most important influences: . During the early 1960s Stella made several series of notched Aluminum Paintings and shaped Copper Paintings before making multi-colored and asymmetrical shaped canvases of the late 1960s.
Some of the artists made works in all three eras, that relate to all of the three styles. Oil paint, which has a medium that is quite different, which isn t water based, always leaves a slick of oil, or puddle of oil, around the edge of the color.
Interior latex house paints tend to be a combination of binder (sometimes acrylic, vinyl, pva and others), filler, pigment and water. Generally artists would draw shapes and areas as they stained.
These works resembled the Color Field paintings of the younger generation. Color Field pioneers such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell are primarily thought of as Abstract Expressionists.
Water-based acrylic paints were subsequently sold as latex house paints, although acrylic dispersion uses no latex derived from a rubber tree. His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been torn off the painting, revealing the colors underneath, reminiscent of stalactites and primordial caverns.
With encouragement from Greenberg, Bush became closely tied to two movements that grew out of the efforts of the abstract expressionists: Color Field Painting and Lyrical Abstraction. One of the reasons for the success of the Color Field movement was the technique of staining.
Commonly used terms to describe the three separate but related groups are Abstract expressionism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Lyrical Abstraction. The Ocean Park series exemplified by Ocean Park No.129, connects his earlier abstract expressionist works with Color field painting.
In 1947, during a subsequent semester teaching at the California School of Fine Art, (known today as the San Francisco Art Institute), Rothko and Still flirted with the idea of founding their own curriculum or school – so to speak. Arshile Gorky openly admired Miró s work and painted Miró-like Gorky paintings, before finally discovering his own originality in the early 1940s.
His painting Big A is an example of his color field paintings of the late 1960s. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Frank Stella was a significant figure in the emergence of Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction and Color Field painting. I actually don t think there was anyone in the same generation in Europe quite to match them.
During the final three decades of his career Sam Francis style of large scale bright Abstract expressionism was closely associated with Color field painting. In Gorky s most effective and accomplished paintings between the years 1941-1948 he consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting the paint run and drip, under and around his familiar lexicon of organic and biomorphic shapes and delicate lines.
However, by 1999 it had been restored, and was installed in the Albany Mall. While Arshile Gorky is considered to be one of the founding fathers of Abstract Expressionism and a Surrealist he was also one of the first painters of the New York School who used the technique of staining. and the West Coast of the United States using formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and references to landscape imagery and to nature. The focus of attention in the world of contemporary art began to shift from Paris to New York City after World War II and the development of American Abstract Expressionism.
Biographer Jacques Dupin said this about Miró s work of the early 1960s: These canvases disclose affinities—Miró does not in the least attempt to deny this—with the researches of a new generation of painters. Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the U.S.
He worked at various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in 1935 was president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. Among Louis s major works are his various series of color field paintings.
Louis and Noland saw the picture unrolled on the floor of her studio and went back to Washington, DC., and worked together for a while, working at the implications of this kind of painting. Morris Louis s painting Where 1960, was a major innovation that moved abstract expressionist painting forward in a new direction toward Color Field and Minimalism. Pollock didn t like Hofmann s paintings.
Many different artists employed staining as the technique of choice to use in making their paintings. Hofmann s paintings are literally a symphony of color as seen in The Gate, 1959-1960.
In several paintings that Pollock painted after his classic drip painting period of 1947-1950 he used the technique of staining fluid oil paint and house paint into raw canvas. Motherwell s style of abstract expressionism characterized by loose opened fields of painterly surfaces accompanied by loosely drawn and measured lines and shapes were influenced by both Joan Miró and by Henri Matisse.
Noland studied with professor Ilya Bolotowsky who introduced him to Neo-plasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian. Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s.
From 1936 to 1940, he lived in New York and worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Although he didn t call them stripes but zips Barnett Newman s stripes were mostly vertical, of varying widths and sparingly used.
His Black Pin Stripe paintings of 1959 startled and shocked an art world that was unused to seeing monochromatic and repetitive images, painted flat, with almost no inflexion. Newman himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with the Onement series (from 1948) and seen here.
Most of the spray painters were active especially during the late 1960s and 1970s. Stripes were one of the most popular vehicles for color used by several different Color Field painters in a variety of different formats. By the mid-1950s, Richard Diebenkorn along with David Park, Elmer Bischoff and several others formed the Bay Area Figurative School with a return to Figurative painting.
I am not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. In Simpson and Noland s case their stripe paintings were all mostly horizontal, while Gene Davis painted vertical stripe paintings and Morris Louis mostly painted vertical stripe paintings sometimes called Pillars.
He didn t take the trouble to. View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure, both painted in 1914, were on view for the first time in the US. Livingston goes on to say Diebenkorn must have experienced French Window at Collioure, as an epiphany. Joan Miró was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
These works often combined calligraphy and abstract shapes. The most basic fundamental defining technique of painting is application of paint and the color field painters revolutionized the way paint could be effectively applied. Color Field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric.
It was if the new paint demanded a new possibility in painting, and the painters arrived at it. Another abstract expressionist whose works in the 1940s call to mind the stain paintings of the 1960s and the 1970s is James Brooks.
Henri Matisse paintings French Window at Collioure, and View of Notre Dame Jane Livingston says about the January 1966 Matisse exhibition that Diebenkorn saw in Los Angeles: It is difficult not to ascribe enormous weight to this experience for the direction his work took from that time on. Frank Stella s approach and relationship to Color Field painting was not permanent or central to his creative output; as his work became more and more 3 dimensional after 1980. In the late 1960s Richard Diebenkorn began his Ocean Park series; created during the final 25 years of his career and they are important examples of color field painting.
Painters such as Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Dan Christensen, Sam Francis, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, Gene Davis, Ronald Davis, Sam Gilliam and others successfully used water based acrylics for their new stain, color field paintings. To say that the painterly legacy of 20th century painting is a long and intertwined mainstream of influences and complex interrelationships would not be inaccurate. The Washington painters were among the most prominent of the mid-century Color Field painters. The artists associated with the Color Field movement during the 1960s were moving away from gesture and angst in favor of clear surfaces and gestalt.
The staining technique with water soluble acrylics made diluted colors sink and hold fast into raw canvas. Brooks began diluting his oil paint in order to have fluid colors with which to pour and drip and stain into the mostly raw canvas that he used.
He and a group of artists that included Kenneth Noland were central to the development of Color Field painting. Her most famous painting from that period is Mountains and Sea,(as seen below).
Color Field painting actually encompasses three separate but related generations of painters. In other words, the very ground was part of the medium, so that instead of thinking of it as background or negative space or an empty spot, that area did not need paint because it had paint next to it.
During the 1960s Miró painted large (abstract expressionist scale) radiant fields of vigorously brushed paint in blue, in white, and other monochromatic fields of colors; with blurry black orbs and calligraphic stone-like shapes, floating at random. Matisse s work had an enormous influence on him, and his understanding of the expressive language of color and the potentiality of abstraction.
Hofmann was one of the first theorists of color field painting and his theories were influential to artists and to critics particularly to Clement Greenberg as well as to others during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1960 the painting was severely damaged by fire in the Governors Mansion in Albany that also severely damaged an Arshile Gorky painting and several other works in the Rockefeller collection.
Acrylic artist paints can be thinned with water and used as washes in the manner of watercolor paints, although the washes are fast and permanent once dry. During the early to mid-1960s Color Field painting was the term used to describe the work of artists like Anne Truitt, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Thomas Downing, Ellsworth Kelly, Paul Feeley, Friedel Dzubas, Jack Bush, Howard Mehring, Gene Davis, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Ray Parker, Al Held, Emerson Woelffer, David Simpson, and others whose works were formerly related to second generation abstract expressionism; and also to younger artists like Larry Poons, Ronald Davis, Larry Zox, John Hoyland, Walter Darby Bannard and Frank Stella.
Miró pioneered the technique of staining; creating blurry, multi-colored cloudy backgrounds in thinned oil paint throughout the 1920s and 1930s; on top of which he added his calligraphy, characters and abundant lexicon of words, and imagery. Frankenthaler also studied with Hans Hofmann.
Water soluble artist quality acrylic paints became commercially available in the early 1960s, offered by Liquitex and Bocour under the trade name of Aquatec. The use of large opened fields of expressive color applied in generous painterly portions, accompanied by loose drawing (vague linear spots and/or figurative outline) can first be seen in the early 20th century works of both Henri Matisse and Joan Miró.
Although staining in oil was considered dangerous to cotton canvas in the long run, Miró s example during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s was an inspiration and an influence on the younger generation. Clem was the first to see their potential.
Acrylic paint stops at its own edge. And Hofmann didn t like Pollock s allover paintings, nor could most of Pollock s artist friends make head or tail out of them, the things he did from 1947 to 50.
Returning to Washington, DC., they began to produce the major works that created the color field movement in the late 1950s. In 1972 then Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said: Clement Greenberg included the work of both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in a show that he did at the Kootz Gallery in the early 1950s. The paint could also be brushed on or rolled on or thrown on or poured on or sprayed on, and would spread into the fabric of the canvas.
Artists would mix and dilute their paint in buckets or coffee cans making a fluid liquid and then they would pour it into raw unprimed canvas, generally Cotton Duck. Brooks regularly used stain as a technique in his paintings from the late 1940s.
His bright reds, yellows and oranges of the early 1950s subtly transformed into dark blues, greens, grays and blacks. His final series of paintings from the mid-1960s were gray, and black with white borders, seemingly abstract landscapes; of an endless bleak, tundra-like, unknown country. Rothko, during the mid 1940s was in the middle of a crucial period of transition, and he had been impressed by Clyfford Still’s abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still’s native North Dakota.
Along with John Hoyland, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronald Davis, Ronnie Landfield, Dan Christensen and several other young painters a new movement that related to Color Field painting began to form; eventually called Lyrical Abstraction. Color Field painting is related to Post-painterly abstraction, Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism, Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction. His paintings straddled both camps within the Abstract Expressionist rubric, Action painting and Color Field painting. Having seen Jackson Pollock s 1951 paintings of thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Helen Frankenthaler began to produce stain paintings in varied oil colors on raw canvas, in 1952.
Exterior latex house paints may also be a co-polymer blend, but the very best exterior water-based paints are 100% acrylic. Soon after the water-based acrylic binders were introduced as house paints, both artists—the first of whom were Mexican muralists—and companies began to explore the potential of the new binders. William Pettet, Richard Saba, and Albert Stadler, used the technique to create large-scale fields of multi-colors; while Kenneth Showell sprayed over crumpled canvases and created an illusion of abstract still-life interiors.
Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken, color that he used in his many of his paintings as grounds. The thing was to decide where to leave it and where to fill it and where to say this doesn t need another line or another pail of colors.
During the later phases of Color Field painting; as reflections of the zeitgeist of the late 1960s (in which everything began to hang loose) and the angst of the age (with all of the uncertainties of the time) merged with the gestalt of Post-Painterly Abstraction, producing Lyrical Abstraction which combined precision of the Color Field idiom with the malerische of the Abstract Expressionists. Nor does he consider it beneath his dignity to use their discoveries on some occasions. Taking its example from other European modernists like Joan Miró, the Color Field movement encompasses several decades from the mid 20th century through the early 21st century.
In 1952, Louis moved to Washington, D.C. Taking issue with Harold Rosenberg (another important champion of Abstract Expressionism) who wrote of the virtues of Action Painting in his famous article American Action Painters published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews, Mark Rothko was one of the painters that Greenberg referred to as a Color Field painter exemplified by Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any label.
Artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland were of a slightly younger generation or in the case of Morris Louis esthetically aligned with that generations point of view; that started out as Abstract Expressionists but quickly moved to Post-Painterly Abstraction. In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Helen Frankenthaler s stain paintings after visiting her studio in New York City.
Clyfford Still was also considered one of the foremost Color Field painters – his non-figurative paintings are largely concerned with the juxtaposition of different colors and surfaces. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.
Hans Hofmann who came to the United States from Germany in the early 1930s brought with him the legacy of Modernism. James Brooks, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Paul Jenkins and dozens of other painters found that pouring and staining opened the door to innovations and revolutionary methods of drawing and expressing meaning in new ways.
Hofmann was a young artist working in Paris and who painted there before World War I. Still s arrangements are irregular, jagged, and pitted with heavy texture and sharp surface contrast as seen above in 1957D1. Another artist whose best known works relate to both abstract expressionism and to color field painting is Robert Motherwell.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s Clement Greenberg was the first art critic to suggest and identify a dichotomy between differing tendencies within the Abstract Expressionist canon. It has to do with surface.
. Many of these, Jackson Pollock for one, have acknowledged their debt to Miró.
During this period, he knew Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov, returning to Baltimore in 1940. In the early 1960s several and various new movements in abstract painting were closely related to each other, and superficially were categorized together; although they turned out to be profoundly different in the long run.
During the early 1950s, Richard Diebenkorn was known as an abstract expressionist, and his gestural abstractions were close to the New York School in sensibility but firmly based in the San Francisco abstract expressionist sensibility; a place where Clyfford Still has a considerable influence on younger artists by virtue of his teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. Certain artists quoted references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself.
Hofmann worked in Paris with Robert Delaunay, and he knew firsthand the innovative work of both Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In his November 1952 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City Pollock showed Number 12, 1952 a large masterful stain painting that resembles a brightly colored stained landscape (with an overlay of broadly dripped dark paint); the painting was acquired from the exhibition by Nelson Rockefeller for his personal collection.
Color is among the things it has to do with. Newman s mature work is characterised by areas of color pure and flat separated by thin vertical lines, or zips as Newman called them.
Newman s late works, such as the Who s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series, use vibrant, pure colors, often on very large canvases. Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and Arshile Gorky s last works were among the prominent abstract expressionist painters that Greenberg identified as being connected to Color Field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. Although Jackson Pollock is closely associated with Action Painting because of his style, technique and his painterly touch and his physical application of paint, art critics have likened Pollock to both Action painting and color field painting. When in 1967 he returned to abstraction his works were parallel to movements like the Color Field movement and Lyrical Abstraction but he remained independent of both. During the late 1960s Larry Poons whose earlier Dot paintings were associated with Op Art began to produce looser and more free formed paintings that were referred to as his Lozenge Ellipse paintings of 1967-1968.
Artists like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Friedel Dzubas, and Frank Stella, and others often used greatly reduced formats, with drawing essentially simplified to repetitive and regulated systems, basic references to nature, and a highly articulated and psychological use of color. The zips define the spatial structure of the painting, whilst simultaneously dividing and uniting the composition.
Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland and David Simpson, all made important Series of stripe paintings. Some of Noland s major series were called Targets, Chevrons and Stripes (see above).
In general these artists eliminated overt recognizable imagery in favor of abstraction. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Color field painters emerged in Great Britain, Canada, Washington, DC.
Its saying it in space. Surprisingly few artists used the spray gun technique to create large expanses and fields of color sprayed across their canvases during the 1960s and 1970s. Color Field painting? I mean, what is color? Painting has to do with a lot of things.
However, Color Field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive albeit in a different way from gestural Abstract expressionism. He traveled to the then Soviet Union to study Henri Matisse paintings in Russian museums that were rarely seen outside of Russia.
Matisse and Miró as well as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian directly influenced the Abstract Expressionists, the Color Field painters of Post-Painterly Abstraction and the Lyrical Abstractionists. I think it was probably invented by some critic, which is okay, but I don t think the phrase means anything.
In 1948, he started to use Magna - oil based acrylic paints.
