THE EXHIBIT OF THE WASHINGTON COLOR SCHOOL

     Beginning in the early 1950s, Kenneth Noland prevailed upon his friend and fellow painter, Morris Louis, to visit New York with him to meet Clement Greenberg. Greenberg took the two artists to visit fellow painter, Helen Frankenthaler's, at her studio where they were fascinated by a painting she completed. "A bridge between Pollock and what was possible," were Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland’s sentiments on the understanding of the piece after they had seen it in her studio in the spring of 1953. Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and a group of other artists living and working in Washington D.C. were collectively known as the “Washington Color School”. This movement allowed for the experimentation of techniques and styles that would lead them away from the heavy impasto, gestural work of the Abstract Expressionists and toward the development of their individual but related styles. The movement, also known as “Color field”, allowed the five artists: Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, and Howard Mehring, to form the core of this important regional movement which obtained its influence from Abstract Expressionism. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland founded the Washington color School based on the idea that emphasizes the total painting surface as a single image. Unlike Abstract Expressionism, however, it tends to stress subtle color relations and ingenious compositions, and the form of expression. Each artist associated with the Washington Color School movement was able to achieve his philosophical goals of ordering space while asserting the primacy of color.  

     This became known as ‘Color field’ painting. ‘Color Field’ painting is less about the process the work, which is at the heart of ‘Action Painting’, but about the tension created by overlapping and interacting areas of flat color. These areas of color can be amorphous or clearly geometric shapes and the form of expression is more consciously organized than that of such painters Pollock, Kline or Kooning who were part of the Action Painters also associated with ‘Color Field’. It can be important to note that ‘Color Field’ is also part of the Abstract Expressionist family of artists (a.k.a., the New York School) and were also called "Post-Painterly Abstraction" by Clement Greenberg.