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Color field Painting
The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour.
From around 1960 a more purely abstract form of colour field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam and others. It differed from abstract expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gesturalapplication associated with it. In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with this development was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term often also used to describe the work of the 1960 generation and their successors.
Alice baber
“When I first conceive of a painting, I must feel it, I hear it, I taste it, and I want to eat it. I start from the driving force of color (color hunger); then comes to a second color to provide light, luminous light. It will be the glow to reinforce the first color. I then discover the need of one, two, three, or more colors which will indicate and make movement, establish the psychodynamic balance in midair, allow freedom to take place, add weight at the top and bottom of painting, and create mythical whirlpools between larger forms.”
Alice Baber, Color, 1972
Alice Baber (1928-1982) was an American abstract expressionist painter, best known for the organic, biomorphic forms she painted using a staining technique which allowed her to explore pure color and elicit a sense of radiant light.
Baber’s stylistic development during the period between 1958 and the mid-1970s is characterized by a series of experiments with color and technique. Having turned to abstraction in 1958, she began exploring a monochromatic approach to painting, primarily using shades of red. By 1960 Baber came to add yellows, greens, and lavender to her work. She gradually incorporated a growing variety of colors into her canvases, a process that reached its hiatus by the mid 1970s when she finally introduced black to her work, achieving a new range of effects and subtleties.
Her evolving approach to painting is also characterized by her choice of materials. In the first half of the 1950s she worked primarily in oil, but soon began to dilute her paint in order to emphasize the different shades of color, eventually expanding her practice to include also acrylic on canvas and watercolors on paper as alternatives to oil. Watercolors in particular lent themselves more easily to her growing interest in transparency and luminosity, as well as her interests in joining light and color in a kinetic fusion. Baber also worked with acrylic. Working in both mediums in parallel led to discoveries that altered the course of Baber’s painting, a method of ‘sinking’ (or ‘staining’) and ‘lifting’ to create abstract, organic forms – a visual style that has since become her signature. Color would remain central to the artist’s practice throughout her career, a theme on which she wrote at length in several publications, and which became the subject of exhibitions the artist curated, including Color Forum, a large-scale group exhibition held at the University of Texas, Austin, 1972.
Post-war feminist artist and lithographer Alice Baber produced brilliantly colored abstract expressionist oil and watercolor paintings by staining her canvases with rounded biomorphic forms. Using a technique of pouringdiluted oil paint onto a canvas in layers, she sometimes experimented with variations of a single hue and at other times created a purposeful interplay of different tones, as in The Song of the Wind (1977). Baber referred to her attempts to relay feelings through color as a “color hunger,” and exploration of “the infinite range of possibilities.” A member of the cooperative March Gallery in downtown New York, where she held her first solo exhibition in 1958, Baber was married to noted Abstract Expressionist painter Paul Jenkins. Baber’s work can be found in the collections of the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Wheel of Jaguar, 1982
Watercolor on Paper 12 × 11 in | 30.5 × 27.9 cm
The Light Inside the Mountain, 1978
Oil on canvas 33 × 55 in | 83.8 × 139.7 cm
Just Arrived, 1962
Oil on canvas 57 × 44 in | 144.8 × 111.8 cm
UNTITLED
watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 IN unframed, 33.5 x 41.5 IN unframed
Paul Jenkins
The paintings of Paul Jenkins have come to represent the spirit, vitality, and invention of post World War II American abstraction. Employing an unorthodox approach to paint application, Jenkins is as much identified with the process of controlled paint-pouring and canvas manipulation as with the gem-like veils of transparent and translucent color which have characterized his work since the late 1950s. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri in 1923, Jenkins later moved to Youngstown, Ohio. Drawn to New York, he became a student of Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League and ultimately became associated with the Abstract Expressionists, inspired in part by the "cataclysmic challenge of Pollock and the total metaphysical consumption of Mark Tobey." An ongoing interest in Eastern religions and philosophy, the study of the I Ching, along with the writings of Carl Gustav Jung prompted Jenkins' turn toward inward reflection and mysticism which have dominated his aesthetic as well as his life.
Paul Jenkins (b. 1923, Kansas City, Missouri, d. 2012, New York, New York) was an American painter who is celebrated for his dynamic abstractions in oil, acrylic, and enamel. His paintings are characterised by their masterfully controlled, multilayered washes of pigment that meet on canvas in oceanic pools and eddies. While the artist’s work was initially received in the terms of American Abstract Expressionism, his sustained, rigorous inquiries into the physiological and spiritual aspects of colour, what the artist termed its “phenomena,” opened it to new avenues of expression that would outlast numerous movements throughout his six-decade career.
Coming to artistic maturity in New York at Abstract Expressionism’s height, Jenkins befriended many of the movement’s leading figures before decamping to Paris, which would serve as his second base of operations for the rest of his life. In Paris the painter established the conditions for his now-celebrated process, in which pigments are coaxed along the surface of a canvas that has been primed and buffed to a silken plane. By manipulating the angle of the surface on which paints traveled and by guiding their movements with an ivory knife, Jenkins produced a body of work that is striking for the singularity of its maker’s conviction while evidencing his spiritual restlessness and continual seeking.
Phenomena Umbra
1982
Watercolour on paper
31 ¼ x 43 ¼ in. (79.4 x 109.9 cm)
Framed: 33 x 45 ½ in. (83.8 x 115.6 cm)
Phenomena Noh Veil
1969
Acrylic on canvas
39 ⅛ x 39 ⅛ in. (99.1 x 99.1 cm)
Paul Jenkins (1923-2012) is a major artist in post-war abstraction whose work is recognized for its luminous flows of color combining opacity and transparency to both emanate and reflect light. An early pioneer of poured paint, Jenkins worked on paper and primed canvas. His paintings have achieved prominence for the fluidity of their forms as well as their gem-like veils of color which have characterized his work since the 1950s. Full of verve with a profoundly spiritual aspect, his paintings have a natural feeling to them, with rarely any trace of the artist’s hand. “A painting” he said, “should be a world not a thing.”
Jenkins made his vibrant compositions by pouring paint directly onto the canvas, then tilting it so the paint dripped, bled, and pooled into fluid, diaphanous washes that resembled ceramic glazes.
His palettes and methodologies can evoke the experiments of fellow abstract titan Helen Frankenthaler.
Phenomena Emanation of Host,,
1989
Watercolour on paper
43 3/10 × 31 in | 110 × 78.7 cm
Phenomena Set the Compass,
1994
Watercolour on paper
43 3/10 × 31 1/10 in | 110 × 79 cm
“It is a presumption on my part but after all, that is one of the expanding possibilities of Abstract painting: that which makes something felt which is not explicitly seen.”
Sam Gillan
Watercolour, 4 1969
Watercolor, and aluminum powder on fiberglass paper 23 3/4 x 18 1/8" (60.3 x 45.9 cm)
Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation, Sam Gilliam wrestles with the physicality of the art object and its relationship to the viewer.
he moved to Washington, DC, during the formation of Color Field painting, which emphasized the use of flat planes of color and novel paint application techniques.
Gilliam soon experimented with color, form, and technique, pouring pigments and folding canvases while still wet.
remove his canvases from their stretchers entirely, and, inspired by laundry on clotheslines, hang them from the ceiling or walls.
Gilliam transformed painting into something sculptural and three-dimensional, disrupting traditional modes of presentation and viewing.
He also incorporated metal forms, alternative materials like yarn and glitter, varied applications of paint, and quilt-inspired patterning into his practice.
“the expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political. My work is as political as it is formal.”
Sam Gilliam, Green April, 1969,
acrylic on canvas, 98 x 271 x 3 7/8 inches (248.9 x 688.3 x 9.8 cm), Collection of Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photography by Lee Thompson.
his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.