Color field

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the style of abstract painting. For other uses, see Color field (disambiguation).
This article possibly contains original research. Please improve
it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements
consisting only of original research should be removed. (September
2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Kenneth Noland, Beginning, 1958, magna on canvas

painting, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Working in
Washington, D.C., Noland was a pioneer of the color field
movement in the late 1950s.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged
in New York City during the 1940s and 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. Color field 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. The movement places less
emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an
overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting
"color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in
itself."[1]
During the late 1950s and 1960s, color field painters emerged in
parts of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United
States, particularly New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere,
using formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and
references to landscape imagery and to nature.[2]
Historical roots
[edit]

Henri Matisse, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (French Window at Collioure),

1914, Centre Georges Pompidou, "Throughout my life, the 20th-century
painter whom I've admired the most has been Matisse", Robert
Motherwell 1970.[3]
The focus of attention in the world of contemporary art began to shift from
Paris to New York after World War II and the development of
American abstract expressionism. 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. Taking issue with Harold Rosenberg (another important champion
of abstract expressionism), who wrote of the virtues of action painting in
his article "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952
issue of ARTnews,[4] Greenberg observed another tendency toward all-
over color or color field in the works of several of the so-called "first
generation" abstract expressionists.[5]
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. 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 the interpretation) means, which is that of the same "basic human
emotions", as his earlier surrealistic mythological paintings. 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. 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. 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. Still was considered one of the foremost color field
painters – his non-figurative paintings are largely concerned with the
juxtaposition of different colors and surfaces. 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. 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.
Motherwell's style of abstract expressionism, characterized by loose
opened fields of painterly surfaces accompanied by loosely drawn and
measured lines and shapes, was influenced by both Joan Miró and
by Henri Matisse.[6] Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic No.
110 (1971) is a pioneering work of both abstract expressionism and color
field painting. While the Elegy series embodies both tendencies, his Open
Series of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s places him firmly within the
color field camp.[7] In 1970 Motherwell said, "Throughout my life, the 20th-
century painter whom I've admired the most has been Matisse",[8] 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.
Newman's mature work is characterized by areas of color pure and flat
separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them,
exemplified by Vir Heroicus Sublimis in the collection of MoMA. Newman
himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with
the Onement series (from 1948) seen here.[9] The zips define the spatial
structure of the painting while simultaneously dividing and uniting the
composition. 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.
Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are
called Adam and Eve (see Adam and Eve), and there are
also Uriel (1954) and Abraham (1949), a very dark painting, which, in
addition to being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of
Newman's father, who had died in 1947. 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 (in his last works) were among the prominent abstract
expressionist painters that Greenberg identified as being connected to
color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s.[10]
Although 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. Another critical view advanced by Clement Greenberg connects
Pollock's allover canvases to the large-scale Water Lilies of Claude
Monet done during the 1920s. 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 Monets 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.
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. 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. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-
figurative black stain paintings, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings
using color. 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. 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. However, by 1999 it had been
restored and was installed in Empire State Plaza.[11][12]
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".
Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken color that he used in
his many of his paintings as grounds. In Gorky's most effective and
accomplished paintings between the years 1941 and 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. Another abstract expressionist whose works in
the 1940s call to mind the stain paintings of the 1960s and the 1970s
is James Brooks. Brooks frequently used stain as a technique in his
paintings from the late 1940s. 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. These works often combined calligraphy and
abstract shapes.
During the final three decades of his career, Sam Francis' style of large-
scale bright abstract expressionism was closely associated with color field
painting. His paintings straddled both camps within the abstract
expressionist rubric, action painting and color field painting.
Having seen 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. Her most famous painting from
that period is Mountains and Sea (as seen below). She is one of the
originators of the color field movement that emerged in the late 1950s.[13]
Frankenthaler also studied with Hans Hofmann. Hofmann's paintings are
a symphony of color as seen in The Gate, 1959–1960. 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. Hofmann, who came to the United
States from Germany in the early 1930s, brought with him the legacy
of Modernism. Hofmann was a young artist working in Paris who painted
there before World War I. Hofmann worked in Paris with Robert
Delaunay, and he knew firsthand the innovative work of both Pablo
Picasso and Henri Matisse. Matisse's work had an enormous influence on
him, and on 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 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both
profoundly influenced by Frankenthaler's stain paintings after visiting her
studio in New York City. Returning to Washington, DC., they began to
produce the major works that created the color field movement in the late
1950s.[14]
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.
Clem was the first to see their potential. 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. 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. 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.[15][16]
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. Among Louis's major works are his various series of
color field paintings. Some of his best known series are the Unfurleds,
the Veils, the Florals and the Stripes or Pillars. From 1929 to 1933, Louis
studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (now Maryland
Institute College of Art). He worked at various odd jobs to support himself
while painting and in 1935 was president of the Baltimore Artists'
Association. From 1936 to 1940, he lived in New York and worked in the
easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project.
During this period, he knew Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros,
and Jack Tworkov, returning to Baltimore in 1940. In 1948, he started to
use Magna – oil-based acrylic paints. In 1952, Louis moved to
Washington, D.C., living there somewhat apart from the New York scene
and working almost in isolation. He and a group of artists that included
Kenneth Noland were central to the development of color field painting.
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.
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. Some of Noland's major series were
called Targets, Chevrons and Stripes. Noland attended the
experimental Black Mountain College and studied art in his home state of
North Carolina. Noland studied with professor Ilya Bolotowsky who
introduced him to neo-plasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian. There he
also studied Bauhaus theory and color with Josef Albers[17] and he
became interested in Paul Klee, specifically his sensitivity to color. [18] In
1948 and 1949 he worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and in the early
1950s met Morris Louis in Washington, DC.[19]
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. I actually don't think
there was anyone in the same generation in Europe quite to match them.
Pollock didn't like Hofmann's paintings. He couldn't make them out. He
didn't take the trouble to. 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. But Pollock's paintings live or
die in the same context as Rembrandt's or Titian's or Velázquez's
or Goya's or David's or ... or Manet's or Ruben's or Michelangelo's
paintings. There's no interruption, there's no mutation here. 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.[20]
Color field movement

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. 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. 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, D.C. during the 1960s
known as the Washington Color School. The Washington painters were
among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters.

Jack Bush, Big A, 1968. Bush was a Canadian artist closely tied to color
field painting and lyrical abstraction which grew out of abstract
expressionism.[21]
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. During the early to mid-1960s, color field painting was the
term for the work of artists like Anne Truitt, John McLaughlin, 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, Robert Goodnough, Ray Parker, Al Held, Emerson
Woelffer, David Simpson, Vasa Velizar Mihich 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. 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 color field is associated with Clement Greenberg, Greenberg
actually preferred to use the term "post-painterly abstraction." In 1964,
Clement Greenberg curated an influential exhibition that traveled the
country called Post-Painterly Abstraction.[22] The exhibition expanded the
definition of color field painting. Color field painting clearly pointed toward
a new direction in American painting, away from abstract expressionism.
In 2007, Karen Wilkin curated an exhibition called Color As Field:
American Painting 1950–1975 that traveled to several museums
throughout the United States. The exhibition showcased several artists
representing two generations of color field painters.[23]
In 1970 painter Jules Olitski said:
I don't know what Color Field painting means. I think it was probably
invented by some critic, which is okay, but I don't think the phrase means
anything. Color Field painting? I mean, what is color? Painting has to do
with a lot of things. Color is among the things it has to do with. It has to do
with surface. It has to do with shape, It has to do with feelings which are
more difficult to get at.[24]

Ronnie Landfield, Rite of Spring, 1985. Landfield's work emerged during

the 1960s. His works are reflections of both Chinese landscape painting
and the color field idiom. His paintings bridge color field painting
with lyrical abstraction.[25]
Jack Bush was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter, born in
Toronto, Ontario in 1909. 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. 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. His
painting Big A is an example of his color field paintings of the late 1960s.
[21][27]

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. His shaped canvases of the 1960s like Harran
II (1967) revolutionized abstract painting. One of the most important
characteristics of Stella's paintings is his use of repetition. His black
pinstripe paintings of 1959 shocked an art world that was unused to
seeing monochromatic and repetitive images, painted flat, with almost no
inflection. During the early 1960s, Stella made several series of
notched Aluminum Paintings and shaped Copper Paintings before
making multicolored and asymmetrical shaped canvases of the late
1960s. 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 three-dimensional after 1980.
In the late 1960s, Richard Diebenkorn began his Ocean Park series,
created during the final 25 years of his career. They are important
examples of color field painting. The Ocean Park series, exemplified
by Ocean Park No.129, connects his earlier abstract expressionist works
with color field painting. 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.
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. Between the fall of 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.
These works were rarely seen by people outside of the Soviet Union.
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.[28][29] When he returned to abstraction in 1967,
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. Along with John Hoyland, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry
Zox, Ronald Davis, Ronnie Landfield, John Seery, Pat Lipsky, Dan
Christensen[30] and several other young painters a new movement that
related to color field painting began to form. It was eventually known
as lyrical abstraction.[31][32][33] The late 1960s saw painters turning to
surface inflection, deep space depiction, painterly touch and paint
handling merging with the language of color. Among a new generation of
abstract painters who emerged combining color field painting with
expressionism, the older generation also began infusing new elements of
complex space and surface into their works. By the 1970s Poons created
thick-skinned, cracked and heavy paintings referred to as Elephant
Skin paintings; Christensen sprayed loops, colored webs of lines and
calligraphy across multicolored fields of delicate grounds; Ronnie
Landfield's stained band paintings are reflections of both Chinese
landscape painting and the color field idiom, and John Seery produced
his stained paintings, as exemplified by East, 1973, from the National
Gallery of Australia. Poons, Christensen, Davis, Landfield, Seery, Lipsky,
Zox and several others created paintings that bridge color field painting
with lyrical abstraction and underscore a re-emphasis on landscape,
gesture and touch.[26][34][35]

Overview
[edit]
Color field painting is related to post-painterly
abstraction, suprematism, abstract expressionism, hard-edge
painting and lyrical abstraction. 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. 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. 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. 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. In general these
artists eliminated overt recognizable imagery in favor of abstraction.
Certain artists quoted references to past or present art, but in general
color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. 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. Color field painters efface the individual mark in favor of
large, flat, stained and soaked areas of color, considered 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.
However, color field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply
expressive albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism.
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 am not interested in the relationship of color
or form or anything else. ... 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. ... The people who weep
before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I
painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color
relationships, then you miss the point![36]
Stain painting
[edit]
Joan Miró was one of the first and most successful stain painters.
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. One of the
reasons for the success of the color field movement was the technique of
staining. 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. 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. Generally artists would draw shapes and areas
as they stained. Many different artists employed staining as the technique
of choice to use in making their paintings. 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. The number of artists who stained in the 1960s
greatly increased with the availability of acrylic paint. Staining acrylic paint
into the fabric of cotton duck canvas was more benign and less damaging
to the fabric of the canvas than the use of oil paint. 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. 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. 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. It's saying it in space.[37]
Spray painting
[edit]
Main article: Spray painting
Few artists used the spray gun technique to create large expanses and
fields of color sprayed across their canvases during the 1960s and 1970s.
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. 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. 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. Most of the
spray painters were active especially during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Stripes
[edit]
Stripes were one of the most popular vehicles for color used by several
different color field painters in a variety of different formats. Barnett
Newman, Morris Louis, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland and
David Simpson, all made important Series' of stripe paintings. Although
he did not call them stripes but zips Barnett Newman's stripes were
mostly vertical, of varying widths and sparingly used. 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. Jack Bush tended to do
both horizontal and vertical stripe paintings as well as angular ones.
Magna paint
[edit]
Main article: Magna paint
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. [38] In
Magna pigments are ground in an acrylic resin with alcohol-
based solvents.[39] Unlike modern water-based acrylics, Magna
is miscible with turpentine or mineral spirits and dries rapidly to a matte or
glossy finish. It was used extensively by Morris Louis, and Friedel
Dzubas and also by Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Magna colors are more
vivid and intense than regular acrylic water-based paints. Louis used
Magna to great effect in his Stripe Series,[40] where the colors are used
undiluted and are poured unmixed directly from the can.[41]
Acrylic paint
[edit]
Main article: Acrylic paint
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. It was as if the new paint demanded a new possibility in
painting, and the painters arrived at it. 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. Acrylic paint stops at its own
edge. Color field painting came in at the same time as the invention of
this new paint.[42]
Acrylics were first made commercially available in the 1950s as mineral
spirit-based paints called Magna[43] offered by Leonard Bocour. Water-
based acrylic paints were subsequently sold as "latex" house paints,
although acrylic dispersion uses no latex derived from a rubber tree.
Interior "latex" house paints tend to be a combination
of binder (sometimes acrylic, vinyl, pva and
others), filler, pigment and water. 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. 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.
Water-soluble artist-quality acrylic paints became commercially available
in the early 1960s, offered by Liquitex and Bocour under the trade name
of Aquatec. Water-soluble Liquitex and Aquatec proved to be ideally
suited for stain painting. The staining technique with water-soluble
acrylics made diluted colors sink and hold fast into raw canvas. Painters
such as Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Dan Christensen, Sam
Francis, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Larry Poons, Sherron Francis, Jules
Olitski, Gene Davis, Ronald Davis, Georg Karl Pfahler, Sam Gilliam and
others successfully used water-based acrylics for their new stain, color
field paintings.[44]
Legacy: influences and influenced
[edit]

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No.129, 1984. The Ocean Park series connects his
earlier abstract expressionist works with Color field painting. The influence of both Henri
Matisse and Joan Miró is particularly strong in this painting.
 Henri Matisse, View of Notre-Dame,
1914, Museum of Modern Art. The Matisse paintings French Window at
Collioure and View of Notre Dame[45] both from 1914 exerted tremendous
influence on American color field painters in general (including Robert
Motherwell's Open Series) and on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean
Park paintings specifically.
The painterly legacy of 20th-century painting is a long and intertwined
mainstream of influences and complex interrelationships. 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. 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. 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.
Matisse paintings French Window at Collioure, and View of Notre-
Dame[45] both from 1914 exerted tremendous influence on American color
field painters in general, (including Robert Motherwell's Open Series), and
on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park paintings specifically. According
to art historian Jane Livingston, Diebenkorn saw both Matisse paintings in
an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1966, and they had an enormous impact
on him and his work.[46] 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. Two pictures he saw there
reverberate in almost every Ocean Park canvas. View of Notre Dame and
French Window at Collioure, both painted in 1914, were on view for the
first time in the US.[46]
Livingston goes on to say "Diebenkorn must have experienced French
Window at Collioure, as an epiphany."[47]
Miró was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He
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. Arshile Gorky openly admired Miró's work and
painted Miró-like paintings, before finally discovering his own originality in
the early 1940s. 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. These works
resembled the color field paintings of the younger generation.
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. Many of
these, Jackson Pollock for one, have acknowledged their debt to Miró.
Miró in turn displays lively interest in their work and never misses an
opportunity to encourage and support them. Nor does he consider it
beneath his dignity to use their discoveries on some occasions.[48]
Taking its example from other European modernists like Miró, the color
field movement encompasses several decades from the mid 20th century
through the early 21st century. Color field painting actually encompasses
three separate but related generations of painters. Commonly used terms
to refer to the three separate but related groups are abstract
expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and lyrical abstraction. Some of
the artists made works in all three eras, that relate to all of the three
styles. Color field pioneers such as Jackson Pollock, Mark
Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, John Ferren, Adolph Gottlieb,
and Robert Motherwell are primarily thought of as abstract expressionists.
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 aesthetically aligned with that generation's point
of view; that started out as abstract expressionists but quickly moved to
post-painterly abstraction. 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. Many of the artists mentioned, as well as many
others, have practiced all three modes at one phase of their careers or
another. 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. During the same period of
the late 1960s, and early 1970s in Europe, Gerhard Richter, Anselm
Kiefer[49] 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.
Painters
[edit]
The following is a list of color field painters, closely related artists and
some of their more important influences:
 Josef  Al Held (1928–  Jules
Albers (1888– 2005) Olitski (1922–
1976)  Howard 2007)
 Edward Hodgkin (1932  Blinky
Avedisian (1936 –2017) Palermo (194
–2007)  Hans 3–1977)
 Walter Darby Hofmann (188  J. S.
Bannard (1934– 0–1966) Parker (1944–
2016)  Wolfgang 2017)
 Arvid Hollegha (1929  Ray
Boecker (born -2023) Parker (1922–
1964)  Ralph 1990)
 Ilya Hotere (1931–  William
Bolotowsky (19 2013) Perehudoff (1
07–1981)  John 918–2013)
 Frank Hoyland (1934  Georg Karl
Bowling (born –2011) Pfahler (1926-
1934)  Paul 2002)
 Stanley Jenkins (1923–  William Pettet
Boxer (1926– 2012) (1942–2019)
2000)  Wolf  John
 Jack Kahn (1927- Plumb (1927–
Bush (1909– 2020) 2008)
1977)  Jacob  Larry
 Dan Kainen (1909– Poons (born
Christensen (19 2001) 1937)
42–2007)  Minoru  Robert
 Gene Kawabata (191 Rector (born
Davis (1920– 1–2001) 1946)
1985)  Ellsworth  Paul
 Ronald Kelly (1923– Reed (1919–
Davis (born 2015) 2015)
1937)  Paul  Peter
 Robyn Klee (1879– Reginato (bor
Denny (1930– 1940) n 1945)
2014)  Ronnie  Ad
 Richard Landfield (bor Reinhardt (19
Diebenkorn (19 n 1947) 13–1967)
22–1993)  Pat  Jack
 Piero Lipsky (born Roth (1927–
Dorazio (1927– 1941) 2004)
2005)  Morris  Mark
 Thomas Louis (1912– Rothko (1903
Downing (1928 1962) –1970)
–1985)  Brice  Kikuo
 Friedel Marden (1938- Saito (1939–
Dzubas (1915– 2023) 2016)
1994)  Emily  John
 Gabriele Mason (1932- Seery (born
Evertz (born 2019) 1941)
1945)  Henri  David
 Wojciech Matisse (1869– Simpson (bor
Fangor (1922– 1954) n 1928)
2015)  John  Richard
 Paul McLaughlin (1 Smith (1931–
Feeley (1910– 898–1976) 2016)
1966)  Howard  David G.
 John Mehring (1931 Sorensen (193
 Ferren (1905- –1978) 7–2011)
1970)  Mary Pinchot  Frederick
 Sam Meyer (1920– Spratt (1927–
Francis (1923– 1964) 2008)
1994)  Joan  Clyfford
 Sherron Miró (1893– Still (1904–
Francis (born 1983) 1980)
1940)  Piet  Frank
 Helen Mondrian (187 Stella (born
Frankenthaler (1 2–1944) 1936–2024)
928–2011)  Robert  Alma
 Sam Motherwell (19 Woodsey
Gilliam (1933- 15–1991) Thomas (1891
2022)  Robert –1978)
 Joe Goode (born Natkin (1930–  Anne
1937) 2010) Truitt (1921–
 Robert  Barnett 2004)
Goodnough (19 Newman (1905  John
17–2010) –1970) Walker (born
 Cleve  Kenneth 1939)
Gray (1918– Noland (1924–  Neil
2004) 2010) Williams (193
4–1988)
 Peter
Young (born
1940)
 Larry
Zox (1937–
2006)