Colour field painting
Colour field painting is abstract painting made of large, flat or stained areas of colour spread across the whole canvas, with no focal point and little sign of gesture; it grew out of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and was carried through the 1950s and 1960s by painters from Mark Rothko to Morris Louis.
The first generation were Abstract Expressionists: Mark Rothko with his soft-edged rectangles floating on a coloured ground, Barnett Newman with fields cut by the vertical stripes he called zips, Clyfford Still with jagged walls of colour. They wanted pictures that worked on the viewer through colour and scale alone, and they preferred them hung low and seen close, so that the colour filled the field of vision.
The second phase began in 1952, when Helen Frankenthaler poured thinned paint onto raw, unprimed canvas in Mountains and Sea, so the colour soaked into the weave. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland saw the painting in her studio in 1953 and took the stain technique back to Washington, D.C.; the critic Clement Greenberg championed them, and in 1964 gathered the tendency in an exhibition he called Post-Painterly Abstraction. Alongside them Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held painted crisp shapes in flat colour, hard-edge painting; in Montreal Claude Tousignant and the Plasticiens worked in the same direction; and in Toronto Jack Bush took the lesson of Louis and Noland into looser, brighter compositions of his own.
At a glance
- When
- late 1940s to 1960s
- Where
- New York and Washington, D.C.
- Leading artists
- Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Avery
Characteristics of colour field painting
- Large fields of colour
- Colour as the subject, spread from edge to edge.
- No focal point
- No central image: the eye moves across the whole surface.
- Flatness
- Little illusion of depth and no modelling.
- Staining
- Thinned paint soaked into raw canvas, so colour and support are one.
- Hard and soft edges
- Rothko's blurred borders on one side, Kelly's sharp contours on the other.
Colour field artists
Every artist below has a page on this site, with a short biography and what a valuation of their work turns on.
The first generation
- Mark RothkoRectangles of colour that hover, painted by a man who insisted they were about tragedy, not decoration.
- Barnett NewmanA single vertical band down a field of colour, and forty years of argument about whether that is enough.
- Clyfford StillAbstract Expressionist who walked away from the galleries and left his work to a city that would build a museum for it.
- Milton AveryAmerican colourist of simplified figures, beaches and landscapes in flat, singing colour, and a mentor to Rothko.
Stain painting and after
- Helen FrankenthalerPoured thinned paint into raw canvas in 1952 and changed what the next generation did with a brush.
- Morris LouisPoured thinned acrylic down raw canvas so the colour is in the cloth rather than on it.
- Kenneth NolandColour field painter of targets, chevrons and stripes, who let the shape of the canvas follow the colour.
- Jack BushToronto commercial artist by day, Painters Eleven by night, then Colour Field by conviction.
- Larry ZoxAmerican hard-edge painter of asymmetric colour bands, who then loosened them into stained diagonals.
- Larry PoonsMoved from crisp optical dots in the early 1960s to thick, poured and thrown fields of paint, and never went back.
Hard-edge
- Ellsworth KellyTook shapes from shadows, windows and bridges, and painted them flat with nothing else in the picture.
- Al HeldWent from thick abstract slabs to hard-edged architectural space you could fall into.
- Claude TousignantMontreal Plasticien of concentric circles in colours that will not sit still.
Famous Colour field works
- Onement IBarnett Newman, 1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Mountains and SeaHelen Frankenthaler, 1952
- No. 61 (Rust and Blue)Mark Rothko, 1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
- SarabandMorris Louis, 1959, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
- Red Blue GreenEllsworth Kelly, 1963, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
What a valuation turns on
Colour field paintings depend almost entirely on surface and colour, which makes condition the first question. Raw, unprimed canvas stains, yellows and holds dirt; soft acrylic and Magna paint marks easily; and a large, flat expanse of colour shows every scuff, crease and old repair. A work that has been rolled, restretched or retouched is a different proposition, and a conservator's condition report is part of any serious sale.
Provenance is the second. Morris Louis rolled up hundreds of canvases unstretched, and how they were later stretched, cropped and titled was decided by others, which still matters to how individual works are judged. The catalogue raisonné for each artist, and the foundation where there is one, are the first references.
Common questions
What is colour field painting?
Colour field painting is abstract painting built from large, flat or stained areas of colour that cover the canvas, with no central focus and little visible brushwork. It developed in the United States from the late 1940s to the 1960s.
Who are the colour field painters?
Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still in the first generation; Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Jack Bush in the second, with Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held on the hard-edge side.
What is the difference between colour field painting and Abstract Expressionism?
Colour field began inside Abstract Expressionism. The difference is gesture: action painters such as Pollock and de Kooning recorded the movement of the hand, while colour field painters spread or stained colour in broad, calm areas with little trace of it.
What is hard-edge painting?
Abstract painting in flat colour with crisp, clean boundaries between shapes, associated with Ellsworth Kelly, Al Held and Frederick Hammersley in the late 1950s and 1960s. It is the sharp-edged counterpart to the soft, stained fields of Rothko and Louis.
How do I sell a colour field painting?
Send photographs of the front, the back and the edges in good daylight, with any labels and paperwork, for a free, confidential valuation. Condition matters more than usual with these works, and we check it, and the catalogue, before comparing a confidential private sale with auction.
