The Color Field Painters

Saturday, 23 August 2008 17:42

Color Field Painting, which gained ascendancy in the 1960s, was another phase of Abstract Expressionism (AbEx). In the 50s, Jackson Pollock and the first AbEx painters of the New York School (The Herald, Artist’s Corner, 6/23/05) believed painting should be an intensely emotional and physical experience. In their “action” paintings, they poured, dripped and flung house paint from cans to canvas attached to the wall or floor using sticks, trowels and knives as they energetically emoted. AbEx was supposed to be a direct revelation of the unconscious moods of the artist and exalted individuality, improvisation and freedom of expression.

Color Field painters, in contrast, developed a more analytical and intellectual aesthetic that championed the poetic effects of immense expanses of pure, unmixed color. They dispensed with illusion, representation and painterly technique. Their only reality was the surface of the canvas on which pure color and geometry were the principal players.

These huge paintings give a sense of expansiveness and wonder. They are abstract and contain no recognizable objects. Of primary importance to these artists were the formal elements of painting itself, such as color, shape, balance, composition, and dimension. The paintings were flat, tightly controlled and indeterminate in depth. All reference to nature and antecedent or contemporary art was avoided. These monumental canvases were meant to immerse the viewer in an atmosphere of color that extended beyond the border of the picture to infinity.

Color Field painters used unprimed, sometimes irregularly shaped, off-white cotton canvas, staining it with color washes or brushing on the paint in variable thickness. The paint was often applied with sponges and cloths to avoid brushstrokes. Oil paint thinned with turpentine gradually gave way to acrylic paints.

The movement was jump-started by Suprematism (1915-1935), the first school of purely abstract pictorial composition based on geometric figures. Founded by the first painter of geometric abstraction, the Russian Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), its principles were laid out in his book, “The Non-objective World” (1926). Suprematism exalted “pure sensation in creative art” and sought “to liberate art from the ballast of the representational world.” Malevich’s radically revolutionary work is exemplified by “White Square on a White Ground” (1918), where “the abstraction of painting attained and fully revealed the abstraction of thought.”

One of the preeminent painters of Color Field was another Russian, Mark Rothko (1903-1970), whose work is shown here. In 1925, he studied at the Art Students League in New York. In 1935, he helped found the Ten, a group of artists concerned with abstraction and Expressionism. Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art of This Century in N.Y. in 1945, and he co-authored a manifesto in the New York Times, writing, “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”

By 1947, Rothko’s mature style had evolved and for over twenty years, he painted huge, expressive, glowing rectangles in a vertical format which almost floated above the surface of the canvas. Abandoning conventional titles, he used numbers or colors to distinguish the works. MoMA gave him a solo exhibition in 1961. He committed suicide in his N.Y. studio in 1970.

“Untitled” is an oil on canvas measuring a huge 81x 66 inches that is in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim. Some historians have pointed out compositional similarities to landscape painting and the grandeur of religious painting, with its elements of frontality, large scale and iconic imagery. Although he once said that there was no landscape in his art, Rothko also said, “Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things.” Indeed, it’s almost impossible not to get a sense of a horizon line in many of these paintings, that place where the daily drama of the birth and death of our days is played out. In front of this painting, there is a sense of being airborne, as if one is simultaneously below, above and in front of the image.

The monumentality, softly geometric expanses of color and marvelous light in this work induces a feeling of reverence. Rothko said, “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on…”

The Color Field artists rejected realism. Modern science has taught us that there are significant limits to human perception. What we can conceive, therefore, became more important to them than what we can perceive. Post-WWII political realities were also teaching us to live with something new which had never been seen before: the anxiety of the threat of human extinction through nuclear annihilation. Rothko and the New York School artists used abstraction to express universal human emotion and revelation in an increasingly secular and frightening world.