“The Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting”

By the late 1950s Abstract Expressionism had run its course, while its core tenet—that painting through gestural brushwork constituted a kind of existential theater with the artist as star—had hardened into orthodoxy. Representational styles like Pop Art emerged in reaction, but there remained a group of painters committed to abstraction who looked for a fresh approach. They found it through an emphasis on color achieved by soaking thinned pigments into the canvas instead of slathering it on the surface. Variously called Lyrical Expressionism or Color Field painting, the style was championed by New York art critic Clement Greenberg (whose previous writings on Pollock, De Kooning, et al. were instrumental in boosting AbEx) though its impact was largely confined the early 1960s. This exhibition revisits that period with works by key figures of the time such as and Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.