Color field painting (Colour field painting in Commonwealth English) 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.".
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."Colour Field Painting". Tate. Retrieved May 2, 2014
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 article "American Action Painters" published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews,Harold Rosenberg . National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 22 February 2008. Greenberg observed another tendency toward all-over color or color field in the works of several of the so-called "first generation" abstract expressionists."Color As Field: American Painting". The New York Times. Retrieved December 7, 2008.
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.De Antonio, Emile. Painters Painting, a Candid History of The Modern Art Scene 1940–1970. Abbeville Press, 1984. 44, 61–63, 65, 68–69. 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."Open Series #121". Tate. Retrieved December 7, 2008. In 1970 Motherwell said, "Throughout my life, the 20th-century painter whom I've admired the most has been Matisse",De Antonio, Emile. Painters Painting, a Candid History of The Modern Art Scene 1940–1970, p. 44, Abbeville Press 1984, 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.Barnett Newman 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."Smithsonian Museum Exhibits Color Field Painting", retrieved December 7, 2008
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.Hess, Thomas B. (August 16, 1967). "A Descent Into the Mall Storm". New York. p. 66. Retrieved May 6, 2011.Pollock #12 1952 at NY State Mall project Retrieved May 6, 2011
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.