ART CITIES:N-York-The Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting
By the 1960s many artists were pushing abstraction in new directions, exploring a range of formal possibilities and liberating uses of color in their work. This shift, which occurred in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, the largely gestural and emotive movement that had dominated the post–World War II art world and yielded a number of divergent styles.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archive
The exhibition “Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting” reflects the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s historical engagement with this artistic period, and, while far from comprehensive, seeks to provide a point of departure for future collection growth that may further illustrate the richness of 20th-century painting. Helen Frankenthaler, who in 1952 had pioneered the “soak-stain” technique, now regularly applied thinned acrylic washes to unprimed cotton canvas, richly saturating it like a dye. Other artists line Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski methodically poured, soaked, or sprayed paint onto canvases, thus eliminating the gestural appearance that had been central to Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. In these new works, figure and ground became one and the same, united through color. While Alma Thomas adeptly applied color theory while using expressive marks, still others approached relationships of form and color through investigations of optical perception or produced precise, geometric.
Helen Frankenthaler, whose career spanned six decades, has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the 20th Century. Heir of first-generation Abstract Expressionism, she brought together in her work a conception of the canvas as both a formalized field and an arena for gestural drawing. She was eminent among the second generation of postwar American abstract painters and is widely credited for playing a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. One of the foremost colorists of our time, she produced a body of work whose impact on contemporary art has been profound. In the fall of 1952, at the age of 23, Helen Frankenthaler made her legendary painting “Mountains and Sea”, the first work she created using her celebrated soak-stain technique. Thinning down her paint with turpentine or kerosene, the artist developed a medium that would seep into and through the weave of unprimed canvas. The resulting stain, which often left a surrounding aura, gives a sense of perpetual movement to a work while simultaneously joining image and ground.
From 1929 to 1933, Morris Louis studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts on a scholarship, but left shortly before completing the program. He worked at various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in 1935 served as president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. From 1936 to 1940, Louis lived in New York, where he worked in the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project. He returned to Baltimore in 1940 and taught privately. In 1948, he started to use Magna acrylic paints. In 1952, Louis moved to Washington, D.C. There, he taught at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts and met fellow instructor Kenneth Noland, who became a close friend. Louis’s first solo show took place at the Workshop Center Art Gallery in 1953. In 1953, he and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, where they saw and were greatly impressed by her stain painting “Mountains and Sea” (1952). Upon their return to Washington, Louis and Noland together experimented with various techniques of paint application. In 1954, Louis produced his mature “Veil” paintings, which were characterized by overlapping, superimposed layers of transparent color poured onto and stained into sized or unsized canvas.
Like his contemporaries, Jules Olitski stained the surface of his canvases in a technique that rejected the gestural brushwork of the then-popular Abstract Expressionist artists. With their emphasis on material, surface, and color’s emotional strength, his signature works eliminated the illusion of depth and any evidence of the artist’s touch. Although Olitski did not remain as well known as some of his fellow Color Field painters, his abstract “spray paintings” of the 1960s are still considered landmark works of this movement. Over the following decades, he continued to challenge artistic conventions. His ever-changing style and techniques made him difficult to categorize, and for a long while he was eclipsed by contemporaries (like Frankenthaler and Louis), who had maintained a consistent aesthetic. However, despite the unfavorable reception of his work in the 1970s through the 1990s, Olitski stood firm in his commitment to wide-ranging experimentation with the interplay of color and light, pictorial space, and the expressive potential of his chosen medium of paint. When he exhibited his final works, in the last years of his life, public and critical tastes had begun to shift again, this time in his favor.
Alma Thomas highly personal style that expanded upon traditional Abstract Expressionist and Color School practices through experimentations with abstraction, color, line and pattern. Thomas, who focused on her artistic career after retiring as a school teacher at the age of 69, chartered her own course as an African-American woman within Washington D.C.’s largely white and male mid-20th Century artistic community. She often cited natural elements as inspiration, and her signature style reflects the influences of Henri Matisse, Josef Albers, and Wassily Kandinsky—featuring loosely painted yet meticulously constructed canvases, filled with lattice works of bright color creating patterns from negative space.
Info: Curator: Megan Fontanella, Assistant Curator: Indira Abiskaroon, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, Duration: 18/12/19-30/8/20, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed-Fri & Sun 10:00-17:30, Tue & Sat 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim.org
