When confronting the huge panoramas of “Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975,” which opened Friday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, many viewers will be moved to utter the same five words: “My kid could do that.”
Yeah, but Junior’s creations decorate the refrigerator, while the 39 mammoth works in this show transformed the wallscapes of living rooms nationwide.
Such was the unintended consequence when several American artists in the 1940s and 1950s asked, “who needs a subject?” renounced the repressive representational regime and engaged in freestyle exploration of pigment’s potential.
Rejecting the notion that art references an object, their free-form take on abstract expressionism gave rise to the Color Field movement. The mid-Atlantic was a key hub of this genre characterized by masses of vivid, luminous color, applied by pouring, spraying, diluting, flinging and combing paint onto unprimed canvas.
Color Field currents quickly flowed from Jackson Pollock‘s dense splats to Helen Frankenthaler‘s hypnotic washes, fertilizing an art movement that America could call its own. Decades before the digital age’s sensory bombardment, these saturated surfaces reflected daring and delight with then-new media such as acrylic, polymers and resins, which could retain vibrancy whether plied thickly or thinned down.
While these are landscapes of the psyche, the artists did want to involve viewers in the “immersive experience,” the exhibition¹s curator, Joanna Marsh, told Examiner reporters. “The artists wanted the viewer to be consumed by color.” To get grounded amid the curling, curving, undulating rivers and pools of color, look for forms emanating from these travelogues of the mind — Mark Rothko‘s harmonious light rays, Frank Stella‘s graceful geometrics, Robert Motherwell‘s barely sublimated monster.
Here, power doesn¹t surge; it flows. Raw canvas luminesces with Morris Louis‘ ribbons and veils. An emerald waterfall of hues explains why D.C.’s Sam Gilliam continues holding fans in thrall.
Once maverick, these nonrepresentational compositions may seem like a visual equivalent of background music. But after braving the wintry mix, welcoming walls of eye candy offer easier comfort than a cerebral workout.
And take the kids. Maybe their finer paintings will end up over some rich collector¹s sofa 50 years from now.
