The Shaping of Color Field

by Rosetta DeBerardinis

I departed the island of Baltimore last week to attend the preview of “Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975,” the new exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

After some lovely pastries and Dean and DeLuca coffee poured from boxes we ventured upstairs to its third floor gallery. Once you emerge from the elevator you become captivated by the large scale chroma-stained canvases which are so imposing that you feel child-like staring up at them. Signage on the walls with names we have all heard or seem before like: Frankenthaler, Louis, Olitski, Motherwell, Gottelib, Davis and Gilliam. But, this is not a block-buster exhibit for the masses intended to draw record numbers of crowds; it is a significant documentation of 39 works by the early pioneers of American art.

Due to limited government funding for museums and art institutions, there is now greater reliance upon garnering private donors to underwrite exhibits. This exhibit is organized by the American Federation of the Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, Gene Davis Memorial Fund, Golden Artists Colors and several individual donors, and few of the works are from the Smithsonian’s own collection.

But, if this exhibit is an example of what can be done without the government, I say ‘thank-you’ now we can really have first-class art shows which are thought-provoking, scholarly and challenging. No, there is no audio-guide with snippets of history or narrative story-telling. This show is intended for those well-versed in the subject-matter, so if you are not, I suggest that you dust off an art history book or Google ‘ColorField’ to ensure that you won’t miss the importance of this historical exhibit.

And, if you negate the importance of the abstract expressionist and chant along with the masses “even my child could do this” then you need to purchase the easy reading color-illustrated exhibition catalogue, written by its guest curator Karen Willkin, a specialist in 20th century modernism.

The post-war Color Field painters abandoned the gestural strokes, the all-over painting and pouring inaugurated by Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists, and instead concentrated on color, spatial ambiguity and process. Their aim was to unify a colorful abstract image or shape on a large surface. This 1950s movement was more about color than form; however, both movements sought to reveal the unknown -not to report just on the visible.

Artist Helen Frankenthaler led the way by applying thinned oil pigment to stain the unprimed canvas. After visiting her studio in New York City in 1953, artists Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (both then teaching in the District of Columbia) returned there to experiment with their newly found technique.

My favorite painting in the show is Frankenthaler’s large scale, ‘Off the White Square’ done in 1973 because it exemplifies the new power and presence of acrylic pigment -- which had just become available when she began using ten years earlier.

And, as they say "the rest is history," because America now had its second artistic movement, the Color Field school, which included Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Friedel Dzubus, Sam Francis, Jules Olitski and later Larry Poons, Frank Stella, Ronald Davis and Sam Gilliam. These are artists who elected to concentrate on pure contrasting hues of color rather than light versus dark. In the words of Frank Stella “what you see is what you see.” However the significance of this exhibit extends beyond what the viewer sees on these colorful canvases. It is a historical event documenting the difference, similarity and distinction between abstract expressionism and color field painting along with the progression of American art.

The exhibition is in three-parts: an introduction to the origins of Color Field painting, its pioneers, and its later practitioners who pushed its further. It begins with Rothko, and the Abstract Expressionists, then to Frankenthaler’s departure from Pollock and the color field artists who followed with a new abstract form based on expanses of radiant unmodulated hues by staining, painting and spraying. And it concludes with the later generation often linked to the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, who curated the 1964 exhibit “Post Painterly Abstraction” and is credited along with art historian Michael Fried for defining and establishing the framework for interpreting the art form known as field of color, later coined "Color Field."

This exhibition is the first major examination of color field painting, and the District of Columbia is the only East Coast city to host this landmark exhibition. After its debut there it will make its final stop at the First Center of Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn. in June.

On exhibit thru May 26th, 2008 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and F Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily (202) 633-1000\ (202) 633-7970 (recorded museum information).