Palette-Pleasing Paintings of The Washington Color School 

When Abstract Expressionism broke onto the art scene in the mid-20th century, the art world took notice. For the first time in history, an artistic movement that formed in the United States became an international sensation and thus marked a transitional moment in which American art took the global stage. Amid this explosive era, artists continued to push the ideas of experimenting with color and form. Among them were the members of the Washington Color School, a loose network of artists who banded together in the 1950s, thanks to their passion for the power of color.

Read on for a closer look at the evolution of the Washington Color School, whose name stems from their shared location in Washington. D.C. Following a brief historical grounding, we’ll look at some of the core artists associated with the group and close with a brief look at their lasting legacy.

Finessing the Field of Color 

The impetus for the Washington Color School began in 1945, when artist Helmut Kern established the Washington Workshop Center for the arts. Soon abstract artists like Morris Louis and Gene Davis started to congregate in the space and exchange ideas about contemporary art, specifically the genre of Color Field painting. Not long after, Louis had the good fortune to meet Helen Frankenthaler, who further inspired Louis in the way she would stain her canvases in different hues to provide unique undertones to her compositions. 

Just as Louis and his colleague Kenneth Noland began to “stain” their canvases via diluted acrylic paints, the Washington Color School painters worked to emphasize the role of color both as a means to convey expression and also to conjure rudimentary geometric forms within the space of their compositions. Given this approach, the Washington Color School deliberately set itself apart from the abstract canvases of figures like Jackson Pollock and distanced itself visually from other Color Field painters like Mark Rothko. 

The inaugural exhibition of Washington Color School painters at the Jefferson Pace Gallery in the city turned heads, including that of famed art critic Clement Greenberg who wrote about both Louis and Noland in a 1960 Art International magazine review. Five years later, Louis, Noland, and others launched a full-scale exhibition, entitled “Washington Color Painters,” at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art that put the group on the artistic map. The Washington Color School launched an even more expansive showcase at The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in late 1965 and then again in 1967. Included in these later showcases were artists like Sam Gilliam, Willen de Looper, and Jacob Kainen as the group continued to attract rising artists to its ranks. 

Five Key Washington Color School Artists

Among the many artists associated with the Washington Color School, several are stand-outs of the movement. These masters include: 

Morris Louis (1912-1962)

An early pioneer of Color Field painting, Morris Louis studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts before pursuing a career as a painter. It was a slow start, and for much of the 1930s he took odd jobs to make ends meet. He moved to New York around 1937 and continued to experiment with his artistic style that coalesced by the 1950s into one dominated by the exploration of color in both geometric and organic means. By this phase, Louis had become invested in the idea of staining his canvases thanks to his exposure to the work of Helen Frankenthaler. His works continued to experiment with the role of large swaths of color set against unfinished canvas. Louis died in 1962, but the celebrity of his paintings live on through record sales like that for his painting, I-33 (1962), in 2015 for £1.5 million. 

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Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)

Following his military service in World War II, Kenneth Noland studied art at Black Mountain College, which at the time was a key hub of avant-garde artistic expression in the United States. White there he found a particular affinity for the simplified style of DeStijl artist Piet Mondrian. As he was exploring a similar streamlined aesthetic for his paintings, Noland met Morris Louis and the foundations for the Washington Color School were set. Noland was also somewhat inspired by the stain technique that he and Louis learned from Frankthaler, however, his work generally tended to explore more geometric shapes, like those seen in Clown (1959). 

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Gene Davis (1920-1985)

Though his first career was in journalism, Gene Davis started to paint in 1949. Soon after he joined the Washington Color School. As the years progressed, he remained one of the more experimental artists of the group by working across various media including video works. He is best known, though, for his paintings consisting of vertical stripes in a kaleidoscope of colors. Playing on the notions of rhythm across the hues that he uses, Davis also experiments with scale.

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Sam Gilliam (1933-2022)

Dedicating his career to breaking the bounds of the painted surface, Washington Color School painter Sam Gilliam trained as an artist and, following military service, continued to develop his style while also teaching. He moved to Washington, D.C. in the early 1960s and further focused his attention on cultivating a novel approach to abstraction. He absorbed the aesthetic of Color Field painting akin to his Washington Color School colleagues but collapsed the traditional barriers of painting by working with unstretched canvas that he then painted and displayed draped in artful patterns. In these paintings, like Carousel State (1968), the play with color and rhythm creates a dynamic compositional space. 

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Alma Thomas (1891-1978)

A dedicated teacher for most of her career, Alma Thomas was a crucial contributor to the Color Field painting tradition as well as the Washington Color School. One of the inaugural graduates from Howard University’s fine arts program, Thomas focused on a teaching career. At the same time, however, she was experimenting with her own painting style. Her works shifted from more traditional compositions to splendid studies in color, like  Pansies in Washington (1969) over the years. Her ability to balance a play of geometry with a wash of rich colors across her compositions made her one of the most celebrated painters of her generation. 

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Seeking Out Washington Color School Paintings

Always a loosely associated network, the Washington Color School slowly disbanded by the 1970s as each artist pursued different projects. The appreciation for these figures was rekindled in the early 2000s, when many of the museums and galleries in Washington, D.C. launched exhibitions of works by the Washington Color School as well as other Color Field painters of their generation. These key artists of the movement still continue to demand impressive prices at the auction block, but the value of their work is not in price alone. Rather, their play with color in an already dynamic era of artistic expression makes them an eternal standout from 20th-century art history.