Color Field - Historical Roots

Historical Roots

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 famous article American Action Painters published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews, Greenberg observed another tendency toward all-over color or Color Field in the works of several of the so-called "First Generation" Abstract Expressionists.

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 your 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. Robert Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110 (1971) is the work of a pioneer of both Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Robert Motherwell's Elegy to The Spanish Republic series embodies both tendencies, while Motherwell's Open Series of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s places him firmly within the Color Field camp. In 1970 Motherwell said, Throughout my life, the 20th-century painter whom I've admired the most has been Matisse, 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 characterised 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. 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.

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 canvasses 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 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. 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 1941-1948, 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 regularly 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 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. 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. 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. Hans 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 Helen 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.

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.

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 in Washington, D.C., 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.

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. 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 and he became interested in Paul Klee, specifically his sensitivity to color. 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. 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.