Colour field painting

Colour field painting is a term describing the work of abstract artists active mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, characterised by large areas of more or less uniform, single-toned colour. Unlike gestural action painting, colour field avoids the visible brushstroke, drama and personal trace of the hand, instead emphasising a continuous, almost boundless expanse of colour that envelops and surrounds the viewer. The tendency is closely linked with Abstract Expressionism; its early pioneers were Mark Rothko with his rectangles of softly glowing colour, Barnett Newman with his vertical zips, and Clyfford Still. These artists sought to evoke sublime, contemplative, almost religious experience through the sheer presence of large-scale colour. In the 1950s and 1960s a second generation, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, developed the soak-stain technique (pioneered by Frankenthaler in 1952), in which thinned paint soaked directly into unprimed canvas, merging with its surface. The critic Clement Greenberg theorised this approach as a logical step toward the purity of painting. Colour field remains one of the most influential currents of postwar abstraction.