Color-Field Painting

“I don't know what Color Field painting means. I think it was probably invented by some critic, which is okay, but I don't think the phrase means anything. Color Field painting? I mean, what is color? Painting has to do with a lot of things. Color is among the things it has to do with. It has to do with surface. It has to do with shape, It has to do with feelings which are more difficult to get at.”

- Jules Olitski quoted in De Antonio, E., Painters Painting, a Candid History of The Modern Art Scene 1940–1970, Abbeville Press, 1984, p.81

Helen Frankenthaler pouring paint onto a large unprimed canvas as part of her soak-stain technique of painting, Ernest Haas,1969, photograph, New York.

[source: http://ernst-haas.com/helen-frankenthaler/]

Color Field Painting is a style of painting which is large in scale and often dominated by flat, single colour. The term was first used by American scholar Irvine Sandler in the title of a chapter discussing American painters in Abstract Expressionism, published in 1970.

The term was first applied in 1950, however artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still began working in this style in the late 1940s. These artists, unlike the Action Painters who favoured painterly or gestural application of paint, were more concerned with colour as an expression in its own right. 

Around 1960, new Color Field Painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas and others. These artists differed from the origins of Abstract Expressionism in which their paintings had personal associations, removing any emotional or mythic content in their work. 

In 1964, Clement Greenberg, art critic and supporter of Abstract Expressionism, organised an exhibition titled ‘Post-Painterly Abstaction’. This term referenced a second wave generation of Abstract Expressionists. These artists moved away from the subjective towards the objective, analysing and questioning the world around them.