Exhibition of the week

Color as Field: American Painting, 1950 to 1975

Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Through May 26

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In the early 1960s, “color field” painting was supposed to be the future of American art, said Glenn McNatt in the Baltimore Sun. During the 1950s, abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock had shaken up the scene with “emotion-laden, gestural” paintings. Color-field painters rejected that effusive approach, and “substituted a cool, intellectual manipulation of color effects and sleek surfaces that almost seemed to deny the intervention of the artist’s hand.” Rather than reflecting emotional throes or elemental conflict, the canvases of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and their cohorts tend to be cool and contemplative, marked by large, vibrant fields of paint and the “virtuoso manipulation of pigments thinned nearly to the consistency of watercolors.”

“Bright stripes, circles, and blobs fill the huge canvases” of this show, said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. Their stark intensity and sharp contrasts capture the vitalilty that made color-field seem so promising. Unfortunately, the exhibition doesn’t properly place these paintings in the context of the fervid artistic experimentation of the 1960s. Color-field painting does “represent a transition between the energetic splatters of abstract expressionism and cool geometries of minimalism.” But it wasn’t the only movement formed in response to abstract expressionism, nor the most influential. “More austere, minimalist art eventually eclipsed the sensuously stained abstractions and reduced them to pretty relics.”

Color-field painting may have been the first major art movement kick-started by a woman, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. In the early 1950s, Helen Frankenthaler began showing canvases created with synthetic paints and a new method of staining. “The technique negotiated a common ground between Pollock’s heroic no-brush drip style and the expanses of saturated color favored especially by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.” Her aesthetic innovation inspired such artists as Morris Louis and Noland to imitate her approach, and provoked critic Clement Greenberg to champion this “lighter-than-air abstract style” as the next big thing. Such hype, unfortunately, did these painters’ reputations more harm than good. Only now can we appreciate their paintings for what they are, rather than what critics claimed them to be. “It is wonderful to see some of this work float free” of overly grand claims, and to reveal itself as uniquely American art every bit as improvisatory and expressive as great jazz.