What is Colour Field painting?
There seems to be a bit of confusion over what colour field painting is and so I will include here a posting from a discussion held in a Painters in Modern Times forum in support of Carson Collins which came up in relation to a colour field Challenge competition. The works in the challenge were mostly not colour field painting at all.
Helen Frankenthaler’s painting are close to what many people think of as colour field painting – the subtle and beautiful layerings of colours that comes with the watercolour medium. Technically and stylistically Helen Frankenthaler was not a colour field painter. Frankenthaler was not a Conceptual or Minimalist artist. True colour field painting is about the formal elements of art –eg. colour and space (space meaning the stretcher itself and the depth from the wall) usually pure abstract and non-representational.
Colour field as I understand it ‘grew out of’ Rothko’s great works, the beautiful shifting and sliding of colour clouds, deeply spiritual and moving. From Rothko and Barnet Newman followed the destructive and heady theories of Clement Greenberg. He single handedly launched and then murdered Abstract Expressionism with theories that demeaned and intellectualized any emotion or passion involved in the act of creation. Greenberg launched Pollock and Rothko to great heights and then did a back flip which pretty much destroyed the artists. Good thing art critics have no standing now. His theories developed into Conceptual Art and Minimalism and of course were in support of Donald Judd and the theory of “specific objects” which ignored the soul of art and anything connected to the human journey. I am so glad art direction moved back into the hands of the practitioners -the artists. Colour field painting never really had the spiritual heart of a Rothko. Colour field in the context of theorists does not excite the senses, it attempts to remove them!
Ideas were stolen by the Conceptualists from the great Marcel Duchamp and Dada as well. Duchamp addressed the problem of art as decoration, as something only to be hung on the wall. To combat the problem he placed a urinal in a gallery and called it a ‘readymade’, drawing attention to the fact that pretty much any object you see is designed by an artist somewhere. In the process he also attacked the burgeoning art market exploiting artists for material gain. It annoys me that subsequent artists play with Dada as if it were just something to play with. Postmodernism dares incorrectly to be linked to the great Duchamp, when it is not, in its intent.
Colour field is from Conceptual Art and Minimalism and it means pure fields of colour, i.e. a canvas painted black or a white on white canvas, totally removing subjectivity and colour that is emotive. Donald Kuspit understood all this and spoke up against Greenberg and his theories. Remodernism from the Stuckists was born; it was also a rejection of the shallowness and impoverishment of original ideas in Postmodernism. The idea of Remodernism was that the great period of Modernism beginning with Cezanne reached a peak with Abstract Expressionism, but the new development had not been fully explored, it was killed before it matured. Remodernism by rejecting formalism encouraged the return of spirituality and passion in art and temporarily stopped the nonsense about art being a purely intellectual and sterile exercise for the theorists.
I applaud the silent death of art critics such as Clement Greenberg, the art critic who managed to move art away from its public and into a graveyard of elitism and lofty and highly objective theory. Greenberg in support of the Conceptualists and Minimalists gave birth to the monster by placing pure abstraction and formalism at the forefront, destroying figurative art and placing artists at odds with each other. At the same time the great period of Modernism was destroyed before it was thoroughly explored and investigated. The great model of Modernism still stands as the greatest movement in recent art and everything else stands as either a correction or an attempt to restore, revive or destroy it. Mediums have changed with the new media arts, digital arts and the moving image, but only time will tell if a ‘new’ radical revolution can grow from this – a new period as great as Modernism itself.
Check out the Remodernist Painters Manifesto on the Group page for further information.
Barbara Sparhawk
This is a wonderfully thought out review of art movements, rosepepper. I don’t have all the same heroes but I got a lot out of reading your sweeping discourse. I would not personally credit Frankenthaler or Rothko with depth of feeling. They were rising large in NY when I lived there, spoiled and smug, and adored for their iconoclastic assaults on a confused public more than their skill or originality. It’s a knotty business, the powerful presence or diminished value of art critics. I never liked any of them much, prefering scholarly inspection by people who were practitioners. But frankly I miss them because they gave the public something to chew on in connection with art, and even if the thinking was misdirected or plain stupid, it usually rose out of considered pondering & more than casual observation. You had before you an opinion, and could ignore or seek it out the way we do with columnists who distill what’s in front of them. Like publishers, they also caused a lot of damage as you say, by finishing off or failing to annoint careers. It’s not better because they’ve fallen to disuse. What have we got now. A absolutely empty, devoid of any critique, anything goes crappola ‘art world’ subject to judgement by no one but decorators, committees, and bankers. There are no standards at all, certainly none employed by the vast majority of puddlers out there who call poop on a plate creative and equal to anything ever done by anyone (and in fact poop could be done by anyone ever). All art and all artists are not equal. I’m not an elitist, but I have huge respect for creative drive and the extent to which we individually push ourselves beyond anything we thought we had in us, to arrive at something brand new. Rembrandt, for example, really did do the best that he could do. That is a very very major accomplishment in any life. I wish with all my heart we were seeing even an inkling of that in the world of art now. THAT would be revolution indeed.
You always return to the core of your being when you write passionately about the field that means so much to you, and I’m always grateful for that. Tucked deep inside your considerable scholarship here is one line that jumped out and melted my heart: ”...the theory of “specific objects” which ignored the soul of art and anything connected to the human journey.” I don’t trust the innate goodness of the art practitioner today the way you do, nor expect them to lead us to unrivaled and unselfish plateaus. But I love your constant hammer on the anvil of truth that springs from feeling. Yes, rosepepper. THE HUMAN JOURNEY. There it is in its entirety, the perfect phrase to describe the need, the drive, the love of all artwork. Thank you again for nailing it.
rosepepper replied
Dear Barbara, just great to get your response and especially because you were in New York right at the time of the upheaval. Interesting what celebrity can do to artists, local knowledge throws out a different perspective. It is pretty outrageous to condense a century & a half of art into a couple of paragraphs! I tried to keep to the point, major achievement for me when I am used to waffling on for pages (as you know). The artists named are not one’s that influence me much in my own work, but pioneers that I respect. You know the biggest dilemma out of all that was that figurative art was being smashed into the ground while Abstract expressionism & Conceptual & Minimalist Art took the stage. Abstractions were everywhere and the human figure was abstracted beyond recognition. I find “pure” abstractions pretty meaningless now, they don’t give me much. I need to connect to the human factor more directly. Thank you so much for picking up on the human journey. What better way than painting or sculpting the human figure is there to tell the human story, this is exactly my point. Yes, Rembrandt gives us so much because he painted a portrait of himself every year; we see the ageing process of an artist and a wonderful man. Classical statues give us the idealization of the human form, Egyptian figures tell us much about their lives and so on. Humans love looking at themselves and for me figurative painting and sculpture through art history tells the story of our lives and we need it because we need to scrutinize ourselves.
Yes I think perhaps you are right. There don’t seem to be many purposeful directions and this came with Postmodernism- an ‘anything goes’ attitude, no explanations. Lightweight fun and shameless copying, nothing original, one word answers to questions. Debates are not the same and the passion and intensity is not there, rather it is scoffed at. This period is transitional; the new media (technology) arts have taken centre stage en masse. Photography has never had it so good. Digital Photography is the dominant medium on RB, be nice comments are mandatory! Little chance there is to eliminate the weeds and imposters. Peer group assessment is the only leveller! Writers could play a bigger role in rattling the status quo, what do you think? Tehehe.. I do love your honesty and freestyle writing, we need more of it to shake out the weeds. lol I like your new profile pic. Thanks so much my friend and fellow artist. :)
Carson Collins
For more information, see also Mark Rothko