Color Field Painting: 1950s-1960s

The Emergence of Color Field Painting

• Clyfford Still is known as the first color field painter, using strong colors and a textural style characterized by bright, jagged juxtapositions of colors.
• Barnett Newman sought absolute beauty and painted broad areas of flat color punctuated by thin lines, which he called "zips," to represent streaks of cosmic light.
• Color field artists focused on the consistency of colors, eliminating brushstrokes and creating smooth paint without texture.
• Many artists used a staining technique with diluted paint poured onto raw canvas, and the introduction of acrylic paint made this process easier.
• Mark Rothko, a prominent color field artist, was born in Latvia and became known for his large blocks of contrasting and complementary colors on large-scale canvases.
• Rothko's paintings aimed to envelop the viewer in a spiritual experience, and he achieved commercial success despite struggling with depression and alcoholism.
• Rothko used synthetic substances alongside traditional materials, creating a compositional organization for his paintings based on two or three colors arranged in horizontal bars.
• Rothko's color field paintings, such as "Black, Red over Black on Red" and "Green, Blue, Green on Blue," demonstrate his use of intense, juxtaposed colors to create a translucency effect.
• Rothko's "No. 5/No. 22" painting is an anomaly in his portfolio, featuring a solid red band broken by undulating light lines, showcasing his attention to the placement of lines.
• Rothko aimed to evoke big emotions in his artwork, emphasizing that color relationships alone should not define the viewer's experience.
• Barnett Newman, another influential color field painter, was born in New York City to Polish Jewish immigrants and pursued a career as an intellectual, teacher, and writer.
• Newman's art focused on large areas of flat color punctuated by thin lines, and he was an intellectual who engaged in various activities beyond his art career.