One of the challenges for abstract painting in general, and for the American Color Field painters in particular, was to find a way to successfully create a larger format. The Cubist painters had utilized forms that limited the size of their pieces since they could not be related to one another in a unified manner across a wide area of canvas. Leading the way to solve this problem was Jackson Pollock.
Of the three primary American Color Field painters (Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-; Morris Louis, 1912-962; and Kenneth Noland, 1924-), Frankenthaler was the most closely associated with Jackson Pollock. Frankenthaler, often accompanied by the prominent art critic Clement Greenberg, visited Pollock and his wife on their New York farm on number of occasions.
Pollock's paintings, created through dripping and splashing paint onto large canvases placed on the floor in his barn, were Cubist in their limited color scale, linear components and repetition of forms. However, his all-over structure, consisting of an evenly accented surface, was a major innovation that opened the door to the expansive canvases that virtually became the trademark of much of modern art and particularly of the Color Field painters.
The tremendous potential embodied in Pollock's approach did not escape the young Frankenthaler. She had experimented with working from all directions on level rather than easel-based canvases in the past, but after witnessing Pollock's methods, she adopted this approach almost exclusively.
Likewise, Morris Louis's utilization of Pollock's structure is particularly apparent in the centralized, all-over images of his early Floral series. In these works, the joyful, colorful images are created through overlapping stripes which cross one another in the center of the canvas and spread much like petals radiating out from the center of a flower.
Noland's Circle paintings, including the refined Sunshine, are exemplary of his own structural approach based on the union of geometric shapes with the optical effects of color. In Sunshine, Noland has placed an outermost circle (a band of green) within inches of the edge on a large (84"x 84") canvas. The next circle of blue towards the center of the canvas is in close proximity to the green band.
The next concentric band, however, a golden orange-yellow, is set apart equidistantly from both the outer two bands and the innermost band of pink. The circular image as a whole, of course, is distributed equally around all four sides of the canvas. In this way, Noland maintains the structural unity of the work in spite of its significant size.
In this way, the three most prominent color field painters utilized Pollock's approach by equally emphasizing every direction from which the canvas could be viewed. This was a revolution for modern art and for abstract painting in general.
Kathleen Karlsen is a mother of five children with a passionate interest in creating a world where children and youth are free to grow in imagination and joy. She has a lifelong interest in metaphysics, psychology, healing and the arts. She manages a multimedia business with her husband Andrew in Bozeman, Montana.
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