1. Art as Art: Post Painterly Abstraction
Art
109A:
Contemporary
Art
Westchester
Community
College
Fall
2012
2. Post Painterly
Abstraction
In the later 1950s, Clement
Greenberg shifted his allegiance to
a new style of painting he called
Post Painterly Abstraction
Hans Namuth, Clement Greenberg, 1951
Image source: Saatchi Gallery
3. Post Painterly
Abstraction
While deriving from Abstract
Expressionism (in particular, the
color field paintings of Barnett
Newman and Clifford Still), Post
Painterly Abstraction represented
the “next step” towards a more
purified kind of abstraction
Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948
MOMA
4. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Greenberg believed that Abstract
Expressionism had degenerated
into an easily reproduced formula:
“Abstract Expressionism was,
and is, a certain style of art, and
like other styles of art, having
had its ups, it had its downs.
Having produced art of major
importance, it turned into a
school, then into a manner, and
finally into a set of mannerisms.
Its leaders attracted imitators,
many of them, and then some of
these leaders took to imitating
themselves. Painterly Abstraction
became a fashion . . . “
Clement Greenberg, Post Clement Greenberg looking at a painting by Ken Noland
Painterly Abstraction, 1964 Image source: https://www.artnet.sk/Magazine/features/kostabi/kostabi9-11-18.asp
5. Post Painterly
Abstraction
The new artists he championed
abandoned the “painterly” style of
Abstract Expressionism, in favor of
“physical openness of design” and
“linear clarity”
Clement Greenberg looking at a painting by Ken Noland
Image source: https://www.artnet.sk/Magazine/features/kostabi/kostabi9-11-18.asp
7. Post Painterly
Abstraction
She began pouring heavily diluted
paint onto unprimed canvas so that
the paint would spread and stain
the canvas
Helen Frankenthaler at work in her studio
8. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Greenberg saw this new technique
as an “advance” because it
eliminated the emotional qualities of
touch and gesture still latent in
Abstract Expressionism
Ernst Haas, Helen Frankenthaler at work in her NY studio, 1969
Image source: http://www.ernst-haas.com/celebrity10.html
9. Post Painterly
Abstraction
The technique was more
“anonymous,” and therefore
enabled greater focus on the
properties of the medium
“In their reaction against the
“handwriting” and “gestures” of
Painterly Abstraction, these
artists also favor a relatively
anonymous execution . . . .
These artists prefer trued and
faired edges simply because
these call less attention to
themselves as drawing — and by
doing that they also get out of the
way of color. Ernst Haas, Helen Frankenthaler at work in her NY studio, 1969
Image source: http://www.ernst-haas.com/celebrity10.html
Clement Greenberg, Post
Painterly Abstraction, 1964
10. Post Painterly
Abstraction
The resulting pictures have a
diaphanous watercolor quality, with
lyrical clouds of color
Helen Frankenthaler Mountains and Sea, 1952
Artnet
11. Post Painterly
Abstraction
In Frankenthaler’s poured
paintings, impersonal process
replaced the emotional resonance
of gesture
The works became more purely
“optical” rather than illusionistic or
expressive
Helen Frankenthaler The Bay, 1963
Detroit Institute of Art
12. Post Painterly
Abstraction
In 1953 Greenberg brought the
Washington DC-based artists
Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland
to visit Frankenthaler’s studio
Morris Louis, c. 1950. Archives of American Art
15. Post Painterly
Abstraction
In the “veil” paintings, the flowing
pigment does not invite us to
imagine the physical activity of the
artist or his emotional state
Morris Louis, Tet, 1958
Whitney Museum
16. Post Painterly
Abstraction
“Greenberg and his followers
applauded Lewis for his
‘honesty’ in making explicit the
real flatness of the canvas.
Michael Fried particularly praised
the disappearance of ‘all
suggestion of the gestural,
manifestly spontaneous
handwriting of abstract
expressionism.”
Jonathan Fineberg, p. 156
Morris Louis, Tet, 1958
Whitney Museum
18. Post Painterly
Abstraction
In the 1950’s he focused on a
simple target-like image (inspired
by Jasper John’s targets)
Kenneth Noland, Selected Works, 1950-1960
http://www.kennethnoland.com/works/1950-1960.php
19. Post Painterly
Abstraction
The target motif and stain
technique lent the pictures an
anonymous quality, allowing the
artist to focus on the properties of
color and pigment
Kenneth Noland, And Half, 1959
20. Post Painterly
Abstraction
The pictures became more “hard
edge” in the 1960’s, and the artist
also began to explore other
geometric formats such as stripes
and chevrons
Kenneth Noland, Turnsole, 1961
21.
22. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Joseph Albers belongs to the older
generation of New York School
artists
Although not included in
Greenberg’s show, his work
parallels the trend towards purified
abstraction
Arnold Newman, Josef Albers, 1948
Image source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32357038@N08/3647471979/
23. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Albers and his wife Anni came to
the United States when the Nazis
closed the Bauhaus
Iwao Yamawaki, The Attack on the Bauhaus, 1932
Image source:
http://www.csun.edu/~pjd77408/DrD/Art461/LecturesAll/Lectures/lecture07/
bauhaus.html
24. Post Painterly
Abstraction
He became an influential teacher at
Black Mountain college and then at
Yale University
Joseph Albers with Elisabeth Schwerd at Yale University
25. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Through his teaching Albers
became deeply involved with color
theory and perception
Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale
By Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz; Phaidon Press
26. Post Painterly
Abstraction
In 1950 he embarked upon his
Homage to the Square series,
which would occupy him for the
next 36 years
“In his series titled Homage to the
Square, Albers produced an extensive
body of variations on a highly focused
theme. Homage to the Square is a
collective exploration of color and
spatial relationships, in which Albers
limited himself to square formats, solid
colors, and precise geometry, yet was
able to achieve a seemingly endless
range of visual effects.”
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geab/
ho_1972.40.7.htm#
Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Soft Spoken, 1969
Metropolitan Museum
27. Post Painterly
Abstraction
The series explored the optical
effects of color
“All this will make [us] aware of an
exciting discrepancy between physical
fact and psychic effect of color.”
Josef Albers, The Color in My Paintings
(1964)
Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: With Rays, 1959
Metropolitan Museum
29. Post Painterly
Abstraction
He was one of the 28 “irascibles”
photographed in 1950 when they
signed an open letter protesting the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
neglect of modern American art
Nina Leen, The Irascibles, 1950
30. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Reinhardt ridiculed the
“transcendental nonsense” of his
fellow painters, and accused them
of “picturing reality behind reality”
“The one thing to say about art is that it is one
thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is
everything else.”
Ad Reinhardt
John Loengard, Ad Reinhardt, 1966
LIFE
31. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Like Clement Greenberg, Reinhardt
believed that art should not express
anything at all
“The one object of fifty years of abstract
art is to present art-as-art and as
nothing else, to make it into the one
thing it is only, separating and defining it
more and more, making it purer and
emptier, more absolute and more
exclusive -- non-objective, non-
representational, non-figurative, non-
imagist, non-expressionist, non-
subjective. The only and one way to
say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is
to say what it is not.”
Ad Reinhardt
John Loengard, Ad Reinhardt, 1966
LIFE
32. Post Painterly
Abstraction
His “Twelve Technical Rules”
defined art in terms of a disciplined
(self-critical) process of negation
Twelve Technical Rules
1. no texture
2. no brushwork
3. no drawing
4. no forms
5. no design
6. no colors
7. no light
8. no space
9. no time
10. no size or scale
11. no movement
12. no subject
Ad Reinhardt
André Morain, Photo of Ad Reinhardt, Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, 1963
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/loretomartin/3428547/
33. Post Painterly
Abstraction
In the 1950’s Reinhardt began
working on large scale canvases
that appear to be monochromatic
Ad Reinhardt in his studio, 1955
Images source:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/01/arts/01blac_CA1.ready.html
34. Post Painterly
Abstraction
On closer examination, the viewer
perceives geometrical patterns and
variations in color and hue
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1957
Museum of Modern Art
35. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Ad Reinhardt, Abstract
Painting, 1957 Painting, Red, 1952
Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art
36. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Like Albers’ Homage to the Square
series, what first appears to be
simple turns out to be extremely
complex and richly nuanced
Tourists view an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting at the Guggenheim Museum
Image source: http://www.voicesofthepast.org/2008/08/15/reinhardt-black-painting-conservation/
37. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Nothing in the picture makes us
think about the artist’s emotions or
intentions
The absence of “authorial
presence” forces us to remain
focused on the painting itself, rather
than seek meaning elsewhere
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1957
Museum of Modern Art
38. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Reinhardt’s pictures are therefore
very different from the emotional
expressionism of the “action
painters”
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-2
Jackson Pollock, Cathedral, 1957
41. “Ad Reinhardt's work became
increasingly reductive and
symmetrical in the 1950's and
from 1955 until his death he
worked almost exclusively in
near-black.”
Tate Gallery
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962
Tate Gallery
42. “These canvases . . challenge the
limits of visibility. Reinhardt’s strategy
of denial echoed his conviction that
Modernism itself was a “negative
progression,” that abstraction evolved
as a series of subtractions, and he
was creating the last or “ultimate
paintings.”
Guggenheim Museum
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960-66
Guggenheim Museum
43. “The kind of profound, self-reflexive abstraction
he advocated was partially a product of, and
reaction to, the climate of Cold War America . . .
Reinhardt sought to create an art form that—in
its monochromatic purity—could overcome the
tyrannies of oppositional thinking.”
Guggenheim Museum
Ad Reinhardt working in his NYC studio
Image source:
http://www.matthewlangley.com/blog/2008/07/exhibiting-reinhardt-
cadaver.html
44. Anonymous Painting
So one reaction to the deeply
“personal” style of Abstract
Expressionism was the exploration
of an “anonymous”
“depersonalized” approach to art
making.
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950
45. Anonymous Painting
The art historian Yves Alain Bois
has identified several common
strategies that artists have used “to
bypass or suppress” a personalized
style:
Art historian Yves Alain Blois
46. Anonymous Painting
1. The utilization of readymade
forms (like Kenneth Noland’s
targets and chevrons)
2. Deployment of chance
procedures
How to Make
3. Reduction of color to
monochrome Anonymous
4. Application of grids to
sytematize and unify
Painting
composition
5. Serialization, in which uniform
elements are repeated
47. Anonymous Painting
All of these non-compositonal or
anti-compositional devices
represent the antithesis of the
improvisational and expressive
methods of action painting
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock, 1950
48. Anonymous Painting
Ellsworth Kelly’s works from the
1950s exemplify the use of
depersonalized strategies to
produce “anonymous” paintings
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
51. Ellsworth Kelly
While the Abstract Expressionists
pursued a personal, expressive
style, Kelly explored an impersonal
approach to abstraction
"I have never been interested in
painterliness"
Ellsworth Kelly
"I want to eliminate the 'I made
this' from my work.”
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
52. Ellsworth Kelly
For this work, he began with a
collage of colored paper arranged
in a grid
Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Colors for a Large
Wall, 1951
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
54. Ellsworth Kelly
The procedure for generating the
image was impersonal and
detached
“Kelly arranged the sixty–four
square panels of the grid in an
arbitrary sequence, likening
his method to the "the work of
a bricklayer."
Museum of Modern Art
Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
55. Ellsworth Kelly
He employed several of the
strategies for making “anonymous”
paintings listed earlier:
The ready made: the color
squares were commercially made
Chance procedures: the color
sequences were arranged by
chance
Reduction of color to monochrome:
each square is a monochrome
Application of grids: the squares
are arranged in a grid
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
56. Ellsworth Kelly
The resulting picture does not invite
speculation about what it might
represent (illusionism), or what kind
of emotion it might convey
(expressionism or symbolism)
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
57. Ellsworth Kelly
As Frank Stella said explaining his
own Minimalist paintings, “What
you see is what you see”
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
58. "I have never been interested in
painterliness," Kelly has said, using
painterliness to mean "a very
personal handwriting, putting marks
on a canvas." There is no personal
handwriting, nor even any marks as
such, in Colors for a Large Wall . . .
Not even the colors themselves, or
their position in relation to each
other, could be called personal . . .
Believing that "the work of an
ordinary bricklayer is more valid than
the artwork of all but a very few
artists," he fused methodical
procedure and a kind of apollonian
detachment into a compositional
principle.
Museum of Modern Art
Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Museum of Modern Art
59. Ellsworth Kelly
In the 1950s Kelly began working
on multi-panel pieces comprising
monochrome canvases arranged in
a sequence suggesting a color
chart
Ellsworth Kelly, Red Yellow Blue White and Black, 1953
Art Institute of Chicago
60. Ellsworth Kelly
The individual panels are
completely without incident -- there
are no subtle nuances of color or
texture to distract from the
straightforward presentation of
color as color
Ellsworth Kelly, Red, Yellow, Blue II, 1965
Milwauke Art Museum
61. “I am less interested in marks on the
panels than the ‘presence’ of the
panels themselves. In ‘Red, Yellow,
Blue,’ the square panels present
color.”
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly, Red, Yellow, Blue II, 1965
Milwaukee Art Museum
62. Ellsworth Kelly
Even the titles are detached and
impersonal
They are blunt statements of fact
identifying the colors of the panels
Ellsworth Kelly, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, 1966
Guggenheim
63. Ellsworth Kelly, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, 1966
Guggenheim
“With so few extraneous contextual
elements, the experience of the work of art
becomes exclusively optical.”
Milwauke Art Museum
64. Ellsworth Kelly
Kelly’s preoccupation with color can
be understood in relation to
Clement Greenberg’s ideas about
“self critical activity” and isolating
specific properties of the medium
Clement Greenberg looking at a painting by Ken Noland
Image source: https://www.artnet.sk/Magazine/features/kostabi/kostabi9-11-18.asp
65. Ellsworth Kelly
While Greenberg identified
“flatness” as the most distinguishing
characteristic of painting, the critic
E.C. Goosen declared in 1964 that
color was its most unique aspect
“Color, disposed upon the two-
dimensional surface . . . is the
prime characteristic that
distinguishes painting from its
sister arts.”
E.C. Goosen, 8 Young Artists, 1964
Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum I, 1953
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Image source: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue16/colourchart1.htm
66. Ellsworth Kelly
Goosen argued that previous
abstract painters failed to present
color in its purified state
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 1957-61
Museum of Modern Art
67. Ellsworth Kelly
They used color symbolically or
expressively rather than
appreciating its intrinsic value
“This confusion is common to the
romantic mentality, which fails to
appreciate experience for its own
intrinsic value and is forever trying
to elevate it by complications and
associations. Red cannot simply be
red, but must be lips, or blood, or
fire. And even when it is accepted
that red must be red, it must still be
presented as dynamic, involved in
tensions, in conflict with yellow or
blue, etc. In other words, the
romantic prejudice seeks
everywhere to find ‘subject matter.’”
E.C. Goosen, 8 Young Artists, 1964 Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 1957-61
Museum of Modern Art
68. Ellsworth Kelly
Kelly’s “color chart” approach to
painting isolates color as a “fact” or
“thing,” presented without
symbolism or romantic allusion
“The form of my painting is the
content”
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum I, 1953
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Image source: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue16/colourchart1.htm
70. Ellsworth Kelly
Kelly believed that this
straightforward presentation of
color as color was a more honest
approach to painting
“Making art has first of all to do with
honesty. My first lesson was to see
objectively, to erase all ‘meaning’ of
the thing seen. Then only could the
real meaning of it be understood
and felt.”
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum V, 1969
Metropolitan Museum of Art
71. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Other artists who pursued a purified
style of abstraction include Agnes
Martin and Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman
Image source: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ryman/index.html#
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Agnes Martin
Image source: http://www.greenfield-sanders.com/portraits/art
72. Post Painterly
Abstraction
Martin pursued a radically reduced
style of painting that used the
simple format of a grid with regular
geometric patterns rendered in
graphite
Agnes Martin, Morning, 1965
Tate Gallery
73. Post Painterly
Abstraction
While such an austere format might
suggest something cold and
impersonal, the works are
remarkably delicate and poetic
Agnes Martin, The Tree, 1964
Museum of Modern Art
74. Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman also explored a
radically reduced style of painting,
limiting his palette to white to focus
attention on the materiality of paint
and its physical support
“It was never my intention to make
white paintings,” he insisted in a 1986
interview with critic Nancy Grimes.
“And it still isn’t. . . . The white is just a
means of exposing other elements of
the painting.” These “other elements”
include varieties of paint (oil and
acrylic) and supports (canvas, paper,
and metals), as well as the process of
binding them.”
Guggenheim Museum
Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1961
Museum of Modern Art
75. “Eliminating the unnecessary
confusions of colour and shape,
he explores the physicality of
painting as an object, heightening
his viewer's sensitivity to subtle
variations of material, brushwork
and attention to the edges.”
http://www.haunchofvenison.com/en/
index.php#page=home.artists.robert_rym
an
Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1965
Museum of Modern Art
76. "If someone is seeing only white,
then they're not really experiencing
my paintings... the white is just part
of the structure of the painting in
order to make things visible. With
white you can see the edges and the
whole means that make up the
composition."
http://www.haunchofvenison.com/en/
index.php#page=home.artists.robert
_ryman
Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1965
Museum of Modern Art
77. “We have been trained to see
painting as "pictures," with storytelling
connotations, abstract or literal, in a
space usually limited and enclosed by
a frame which isolates the image. It
has been shown that there are
possibilities other than this manner of
"seeing" painting. An image could be
said to be "real" if it is not an optical
reproduction, if it does not symbolize
or describe so as to call up a mental
picture. This "real" or "absolute"
image is only confined by our limited
perception.”
Robert Ryman
http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibs_b/ryman/
essay.html
Robert Ryman, Surface Veil, 1970
Museum of Modern Art
78. “The wall plays an active role in the
experience and meaning of Ryman's
works . . . "If you were to see any of
my paintings off of the wall, they
would not make any sense at all . . .
unlike the usual painting where the
image is confined within the space of
the paint plane," the artist has pointed
out.”
http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibs_b/ryman/
essay.html
Robert Ryman at Pace Wildenstein, 2006
79. Robert Ryman
Learn more about Robert Ryman
by visiting the PBS Art:21 website
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ryman/index.html
