Color Field painting consciously distanced itself from
societal referents and focused on the lyrical possibilities of color. For the first time since
Impressionism, pure opticality held primacy over content and form.
Michael McNay from The Guardian wrote:
Kenneth Noland, was one of the young artists tasked
with seizing the star-spangled standard from the preceding warrior generation
of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and bearing it aloft into battle. Even more
than this, Noland enjoyed having Americans claiming him as the successor to the
mantle of Matisse, but in truth he had more in common with the Bauhaus
abstractionist Josef Albers, who moved to the US and taught Noland at Black
Mountain college, North Carolina. Noland disliked what he regarded
as Albers's doctrinaire approach, but his own practice of geometric
abstraction remained indelibly marked by the old German's influence.
Noland became celebrated in the 1950s for his series of concentric
circles in a dazzling array of colours; not, like the paintings of Jasper
Johns, targets, but circles as a simple geometric form that could demonstrate
an infinite number of colour combinations. Next came circles with blurred
edges, like blazing catherine wheels, diamond shapes, diamonds within circles,
chevrons and stripes. The message was
colour, usually pure and always simple.
Read more
Did you see the exhibition:
Read more
Did you see the exhibition:
Colour Chart: Reinventing
Colour, 1950 to Today, Tate Liverpool
SUNDAY 31 MAY 2009
“Since there has been art, there have
been disagreements about colour – what it means, how to use it, whether it is a
good or bad thing.
Vasari
held that colore was Venetian, while disegno – roughly, drawing – was
Florentine and thus (Vasari was from Florence) better. The row rumbled on for
400 years: drawing was rational, clever, Poussin; colour was sensuous, sensual,
Rubens. And so things stood until the 20th century, when two changes took
place, the subject of a show called Colour Chart at Tate Liverpool.
The first change was
that the number and kind of colours available to artists mushroomed with
developments in paint-making. This wasn't just about stuff sold in art shops:
for the first time, artists took to buying colours from their local B&Q.
An early apostle of
household paint was Picasso, who waxed particularly lyrical about a commercial
enamel called Ripolin. The first burst of colour on the dowdy palette of
Analytic Cubism came courtesy of Ripolin, in Picasso's Violin, Glass, Pipe and
Anchor of 1912.
Largely, though, the
hues and tints of hardware paints were still used as a means to an end – to
convey mood or rhythm, or to reproduce the warmth of sun on brick. It was only
after the Second World War that the idea of color gratia coloris – colour for
colour's sake – took off, marking a second phase in the 20th century's
chromatic revolution.
Various things brought
this about. The first was a rebellion against the valuing of skill which had
held sway since Phidias. As far back as 1921, Aleksandr Rodchenko's Pure Red
Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour, shown at Tate Modern earlier this
year, had hinted that the hand no longer counted in painting – that a canvas
covered in a single pigment was as valid a work as the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Still, Rodchenko had made his statement in artist's oils. Now, nonart paints –
the kind of stuff anyone might buy and use for anything – brought the point
home.
Modernity wasn't going
to dwell in an ivory tower, or at least in academies and art museums. It was
going to be made in ex-light industrial lofts and factories, and its making
would be open to anyone with a tin of paint and a roller. (Or, in the case of
Dan Flavin and Donald Judd fluorescent tubes and a steel cutter.)
Commercial paints,
familiar to anyone who had ever decorated a spare room or sprayed a bent
fender, were a visible sign of what Colour Chart's curator, Ann Temkin, calls
the "de-skilling" of art. It was all very democratic, although, as
often with democracy, not completely so.
Actually, there were
three requirements to being a modern artist: a tin of paint, a roller and an
idea. Bound up in the dissing of the hand in art was a new fetishising of the
mind – a way of working that Sol LeWitt dubbed "conceptual". LeWitt's
Wall Drawing #918, a room-sized work, announces its intentions in eye-frying,
shop-bought colours, in the fact that it has a number rather than a name – it,
too, might have been ordered from a shop – and that it wasn't made by LeWitt
but by his assistants.
In the demotic phrase
of the builder's yard, Wall Drawing #918was contracted out, and looks it.
Changing attitudes towards colour in the 20th century aresummed up by a
sequence of three German artists.
In the Bauhaus of
the1930s, Josef Albers painted squares of Masonite, the chipboard of its day,
insub-squares of overlapping colours. The beauty Albers sought was of
systematisation, a literally chromatic scale to match a musical one. Forty
years later, Gerhard Richter up-ended Albers' thinking by painting pictures
that didn't just look like colour charts but actually were.
Works such as 1025
Colours are precisely what they claim to be: deadpan recreations of Pantone
sheets, a self-referring self-advertisement. Twenty years on from Richter,
Katharina Fritsch's Eight Paintings in Eight Colours (1991)shows the impossible
position Richter had left her in. If you're a chromatic painter, where do you
go from 1025Colours?
Fritsch's answer, a
snapshot of art in the 1990s, is to turn the question into a game by putting
single hues in big, academy frames”
ColourChart is that
engaging thing, a show that takes something familiar and, by focussing on it,
makes you see it afresh. By all means go.TateLiverpool (0151-702 7400) to 13 Sep
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