Color field
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
During the final three decades of his career, Sam Francis' style of large-scale bright abstract expressionism was closely associated with color field painting.
[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.
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 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.
In 2007, Karen Wilkin curated an exhibition called Color As Field: American Painting 1950–1975 that traveled to several museums throughout the United States.
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.
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.
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 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.
However, color field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive albeit in a different way from gestural abstract expressionism.
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.
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.
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.
Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland and David Simpson, all made important Series' of stripe paintings.
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.
[39] Unlike modern water-based acrylics, Magna is miscible with turpentine or mineral spirits and dries rapidly to a matte or glossy finish.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
