Urban Animals - Art Gallery of Alberta

The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program
The History of Abstraction: A Survey con’t
Colour Field Painting
Abstraction in the visual arts has taken
many forms over the 20th century. One of
these is Colour Field Painting.
Colour Field painting emerged in New York
City during the 1940s and 1950s. Inspired by
European modernism and closely related to
Abstract Expressionism, colour field
painting is characterized primarily by large fields
of flat, solid colour spread across or stained into
the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface
and a flat picture plane. The movement places
less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and
action in favour of an overall consistency of
form and process.
Henri Matisse
View of Notre Dame, 1914
Oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The use of large opened fields of expressive colour applied in generous painterly portions,
accompanied by loose drawing, was first seen in the early 20th century works of Henri Matisse
and Joan Miró. These artists, along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet
Mondrian directly influenced the Abstract Expressionists, the Colour Field painters and the
Lyrical Abstractionists. During the late 1950s and 1960s Colour Field painters emerged in
Great Britain, Canada, Washington, D.C. and the West Coast of the United States. Using
formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and references to landscape
imagery and to nature these artists began to break away stylistically from abstract
expressionism; experimenting with new ways of making pictures and new ways of
handling paint and colour. The artists associated with the Colour Field movement moved
away from the violence and anxiety of Action Painting toward a new and ‘calmer’
language of colour.
An important distinction that made colour field painting different from abstract
expressionism was the paint handling. Colour Field painters revolutionized the way paint
could be effectively applied as they sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric. In this aim
they used greatly reduced formats with drawing essentially simplified to repetitive and
regulated systems, basic references to nature, and a highly articulated and
psychological use of colour. In general these painters eliminated overt recognizable imagery
and sought to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image often with series
of related types. Unlike the emotional energy and gestural surface marks and paint handling of
abstract expressionists, colour field painters sought to efface individual marks in favour of large,
flat, stained and soaked areas of colour.
AFA Travelling Exhibition Program, Edmonton, AB. Ph: 780.428.3830 Fax: 780.421.0479
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