8 Famous Color Field Paintings that Define the Genre

As the 1940s came to a close, a number of artists were looking for something new. Among them were Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, leading figures in American Abstract Expressionism who wanted to redefine the genre with a groundbreaking style that set them apart from their predecessors and rejected any emphasis on gesture or action. Instead, color was their emotive driver. This venture spawned a revolutionary style of abstractionism that would come to be known as Color Field Painting.

“We are creating images whose reality is self-evident, and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful,”

Barnett Newman

What is Color Field Painting?

Color field painting represents a style of abstract painting that emerged during the 1950s and ‘60s in New York City. Considered a subset within Abstract Expressionism, this innovative style favors vast expanses of color and flat spaces on large-scale canvases.

Termed Post-Painterly Abstraction by the art critic and color field painting champion, Clement Greenberg, this new art movement placed less emphasis on gesture or action and embraced consistency of form and process, with the aim of the viewer being enveloped in color to evoke emotion. Any concept of figurative art was abandoned, as was anything tangible from everyday life. Instead, the power of color was unleashed.

The History of Color Field Painting

When the term color field painting was originally coined in the 1950s, it was used to describe the work of the early pioneering trio: Rothko, Newman and Still. Their work primarily invoked a modern, mythic experience, immersing the viewer in color as part of a search for transcendence and the infinite. 

However, this fabled approach was short-lived. During the style’s second wave, artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski also harnessed the spirit of non-figurative painting but embraced the idea of form as more important than any mythical content. 

Regardless of the approach, these artists were all united by the basic tenet of nonconformist art. They rejected ideas of traditional painting in favor of a rebellious art form that lacked a field of vision or central focus. Instead, their work emphasized the flatness of the surface, rejected objects in the natural world and revealed the artist’s emotional state of mind through the expression of color.

This idea was revolutionary, but as the 1960s progressed, the highly formalist trend of color field painting began to eat itself. Artists fragmented into smaller abstract groups that pursued reductionist agendas to purge art of superfluous rhetoric and allusion. As the century advanced, though, the formerly dismissed color field painting was embraced by critics and enthusiasts. Mark Rothko’s piece, Orange, Red, Yellow, even set an auction record in the post-war category when it sold for close to $87 million in 2012.

Famous Color Field Painting Artists

Color field painters are the quiet residents in the abstract expressionist neighborhood, especially when compared to the loud action painters of the age, like Jackson Pollock. Clyfford Still is widely believed to be the first artist to arrive in the color field landscape in the late 1940s, with Rothko and Newman following close behind. 

The artists of the second wave, who emerged throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, include Frankenthaler, Louis, Noland, and Olitski, along with Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam. As Color Field Painting gained traction in the United States, Britain saw its own share of artists embrace the style, like Robyn Denny and John Hoyland.

Color Field painters are the quiet residents in the Abstract Expressionist neighbourhood, especially when compared to the loud Action Painters of the age like Jackson Pollock. And while they both shared an abstract approach, Color Field art in the post-war years was characterized by large expanses of solid color, spread across the canvas to create areas of unbroken color and a flat picture plane.

Famous Examples of Color Field Painting

Although underappreciated in their time, many color field paintings remain as clear and crisp today as the paint used to create them back then. And eight genre-defining paintings can be found, in chronological order, below.

Barnett Newman – Vir heroicus sublimis (Man Heroic & Sublime), 1950-51

Barnett Newman – Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Man Heroic and Sublime). Image courtesy of John Wisniewski via Flickr.

“Old standards of beauty were irrelevant: the sublime was all that was appropriate – an experience of enormity which might lift modern humanity out of its torpor”

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman’s creation the ‘zip,’ which features a band of vertical color, changed how his piece, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, was viewed. It proved to be a catalyst for abstract expressionists and color field painters, as it avoided conventional images of figure and ground. His large masterpiece was also intended to be viewed from a close vantage point, allowing the colors and zips to envelop viewers.

After working as a teacher, writer and critic, Newman arrived at his specialty in the 1940s, when he decided his early expressionist paintings were unworthy of consideration and subsequently destroyed them. He died in 1970, but his work lives on, particularly at auction, where Black Fire 1 sold for $84.2 million in 2014.

Helen Frankenthaler – Mountains and Sea, 1952

Helen Frankenthaler rarely gets the plaudits she deserves despite playing a crucial role in the evolution of color field painting. The influence of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell (whom she later married) was evident in her work, Mountains and Sea, which pioneered the stain painting technique and led art critic Clement Greenberg to label her as the “next big thing” in American art.

Frankenthaler poured turpentine-thinned paint onto unprimed canvas for Mountains and Sea, producing a luminous color wash that merged with the canvas. Her style is notable for its emphasis on spontaneity. As Frankenthaler said, “a really good picture looks as if it happened at once.” She received the National Medal of Arts in 2001.

Clyfford Still – D-No. 1, 1957

Clyfford Still’s paintings, devoid of obvious subject matter, embodied the contemplative color and open space techniques of color field painting. In the late 1950s, his piece, D-No.1, showcased his evocative style through a fiery clash of yellow and black applied to the canvas with a palette knife to create texture. 

Still’s work highlights the existential struggle of the human spirit against the forces of nature through bold, clashing colors reminiscent of caves or vast abysses momentarily illuminated by crackling flares of light. Although Still dabbled in Impressionism and Surrealism in his early years, his later paintings hugely impacted the establishment of Abstract Expressionism. 

Morris Louis – Gamma Tau, 1960

Following a trip to Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio with Kenneth Noland in 1953, Louis was impressed by Frankenthaler’s stain paintings, particularly Mountains and Sea. Suitably inspired, he experimented with method and medium throughout the rest of his career. From his painting series Unfurled, he’s known for controlling the flow and stain of acrylic paints by folding and bending large canvases. 

This unique application of paint emphasized the fluidity and saturated colors of Louis’ art, allowing him to eliminate his own touch from the paintings. This helped establish a link between his original style of Abstract Expressionism and the newly adopted form of Color Field Painting. The 102 x 166 inch Gamma Tau became his most defining piece of work.

Mark Rothko – Orange, Red, Yellow, 1961

Mark Rothko’s art is characterized by a sense of space and the vibrant, expressive use of searing block colors across large areas that draw the viewer into the darkest depths of despair and anguish. He didn’t originally consider himself a Color Field artist as he took on Abstraction and Surrealism. However, regardless of style, incendiary bright colors and deep, dark tones brought an encapsulating expressionism to every Rothko artwork.

The color red proved popular at auction, as Orange, Red, Yellow sold for close to $87 million in 2012, setting a nominal value record at a public auction for a post-war painting. And showing the interest people had in seeing raw, fundamental human emotions represented in art. 

“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” Rothko declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.”

Robyn Denny – Madras, 1961

Robyn Denny helped change the face of British art history in the 1960s and ‘70s through his Anglicized application of the American abstract expressionism movement. Reacting against the tradition of British landscape painting, Denny was part of the Tachiste movement (a European variation on American abstract expressionism), which developed into hard edge painting in the 1960s, as seen in Madras.

Madras features vertical bands within a frame which suggest architecture, gateways and the human body. Denny preferred hanging his works low on the wall so viewers felt they could step into the picture, further highlighting the immersion aspect of color field painting. Madras achieved its estimate of £50,000 when it went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in 2017.

Kenneth Noland – East-West, 1963

Known for his exacting symmetry, Kenneth Noland used his art to infuse crisp colors with simple, geometric forms. He employed a variety of shapes, including targets, chevrons and stripes, while also experimenting with other styles and different shaped canvases. Through East-West, he exercised his signature chevron style. The piece went for $750,000 at Sotheby’s in 2019, a bargain compared to his color field contemporaries.

Noland’s method involved staining the canvas with color, removing the artist through brushstrokes. His later work covered the entirety of its canvases, making the lines and colors seem unending and prompting the critic Clement Greenberg to suggest Noland’s art was “capable of repeating the picture beyond its frame into infinity.”

Frank Stella – The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1870-1970, 1970

By 1970, Frank Stella was an established figure in modern abstraction. Characteristic of color field work, Stella’s spectrums lacked any representation or figurative forms. His bands of varying colors strived to create a three-dimensional field of pure color, as achieved in The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1870-1970, commissioned by the museum for its 100th anniversary. It sold for an enviable $46,875 at Sotheby’s in 2010.

The piece delicately balanced alternating color bands to create a visual plane, but vivid colors weren’t Stella’s only medium. In the 1990s, he explored Surrealist printmaking with The Fountain, as well as sculpture. Meanwhile, his Black Paintings series featuring parallel black stripes in smoothly applied house paint served as an important catalyst for Minimalist art of the 1960s.

The Influence of Color Field Painting on the Evolution of Art

The color field painting boom of the 1950s paved the way for new forms of abstract expressionism in the latter half of the 20th century. Movements including Washington Color School, Hard Edge Painting and Minimalism all emerged during this time. Artists including Gene Davis and Jack Bush contributed to the shifting abstract landscape. 

The 1960s saw figures like Larry Poons and Richard Diebenkorn expand the boundaries of Abstraction, integrating elements of landscape, gesture and touch into their work. This bridged color field painting with Lyrical Abstraction, a style defined by the imaginative, subjective and abstract communication of emotions that rivaled the technique behind musical composition, hence the term “lyrical.”

Color Field Painting in Summary

Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, Color Field Painting brought new meaning to the field of American Abstract Expressionism. Embracing wide, open spaces infused with vibrant splashes of color, this groundbreaking form sought to create images that transcended the canvas, blurring the line between art and viewer. The artists that took advantage of color field painting saw an opportunity to do something new and adventurous, a rebellious feat that not only redefined abstractionism but enabled future art movements to grow and thrive. 

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Sources: TheArtStory.org – Color Field Painting | Magazine.Artland.com – Art Movement: Color Field Painting | MoMA.org – Barnett Newman | JoseArtGallery.com – Color Field Painting