2col theta

Morris Louis, “Theta,” 1961, acrylic resin (Magna) on canvas, 102 by 168 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, anonymous gift. —©Photograph 2007 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ©1961 Morris Louis.

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FOR 11/2

‘COLOR AS FIELD’ WILL OPEN NOV. 9 AT DENVER MUSEUM w/1 cut

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DENVER, COLO. — The American Federation of Arts (AFA) in New York City announces the November 9 opening of “Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975,” an exhibition of approximately 40 paintings that mark a highpoint in American abstraction.

On view through February 3 in Denver, “Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975” aims to underscore the significance and importance of work that tests the limits of how completely art can address emotions and intellect through the eye, just as music does through the ear, without recourse to explication or interpretation.

The exhibition organized by the federation will travel to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., February 29–May 26 and Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tenn., June 20–September 21.

“The great Color Field paintings of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s display an exquisite beauty and vitality, and the AFA is delighted to be presenting this overdue reassessment of one of the crowning achievements of postwar American abstract art,” said Julia Brown, director of the AFA.

More than half a century has passed since Helen Frankenthaler first began staining thin, luminous paint into raw canvas, translating the implications of Jackson Pollock’s allover poured paintings into a personal language. Frankenthaler’s way of simultaneously painting and drawing with delicate washes on unprimed canvas — famously described by Morris Louis as “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible” — pointed the way to a new kind of American abstraction based on expanses of radiant, uninflected hues.

The paintings compel attention by their color, large scale and confrontational compositions such as flowing sheets or concentric rings of brilliant hues, discrete bands or syncopated dots. For all their commanding presence, however, these paintings are also uncannily disembodied; the zones of color seem to have come into being almost independently of the hand.

Color Field painting, as this approach came to be known, includes some of the most powerful pictures in the history of recent art; yet in the wake of Post-Modernism — with its cynicism, irony and political agendas — Color Field abstraction — with its wholehearted quest for visual impact and wordless eloquence — has been somewhat overlooked. “Color as Field” offers an opportunity to reevaluate this important aspect of American abstract painting.

The exhibition begins by tracing the origins of Color Field painting in American postwar abstraction of the 1950s, as a rejection of the gestural, layered, hyperemotional approach typical of Willem de Kooning and his followers and, at the same time, as a development and expansion of ideas about alloverness and the primacy of color posited by the work of other members of the Abstract Expressionist generation, such as Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

The next section of the exhibition focuses on the artists first associated with Color Field painting: Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. These painters, along with most of their colleagues, quickly began to exploit the properties of newly developed acrylic paint after initially working in thinned-out paint.

The exhibition concludes with an exploration of a number of works completed from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. At the time, many gifted, ambitious painters were exploring closely related ideas about making color a driving force. The inclusion of their work in this exhibition, along with that of their colleagues, broadens the view of the ideas about color, materiality and process that engaged many of the most adventurous painters of the time.

“Color as Field” is accompanied by a fully illustrated 127-page catalog published by the American Federation of Arts in association with Yale University Press.

The AFA is a nonprofit institution that organizes art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishes exhibition catalog and develops educational materials and programs. For more information on the AFA, visit www.afaweb.org.

The Denver Art Museum is downtown in the Civic Center Cultural Complex on 14th Avenue. For information, www.denverartmuseum.org or 720-865-5000.