Washington Color School
The Washington Color School was a group of painters in Washington, D.C. who made color itself the subject of their work. Centered on Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland and defined by the landmark 1965 exhibition Washington Color Painters at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the movement belonged to the wider color field current of post-painterly abstraction. Its engine was the soak-stain technique: after Clement Greenberg introduced Louis to Helen Frankenthaler in 1954, Louis, Noland and their Washington colleagues adopted her method of pouring thinned paint onto raw canvas, leaving color as a stain with no visible brushwork. The result was large, flat, non-representational painting - stripes, chevrons, targets and rivulets of pure color - that stood as the orderly counterweight to Abstract Expressionist gesture.
Defining characteristics
- Soak-stain technique: thinned paint poured onto raw, unprimed canvas
- Color as subject - large flat areas of pure, often unmixed pigment
- No visible brushwork or painterly gesture; stains with no traces of application
- Hard-edged geometric formats: stripes, chevrons, concentric targets, unfurled bands
- Orderly, non-representational surfaces that reject Abstract Expressionist drama
Key figures
- Morris Louis (1912-1962) — Co-founder whose stained veils and Unfurleds defined the movement's technique
- Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) — Co-founder whose targets, chevrons and stripes set its geometric repertoire
- Gene Davis (1920-1985) — Painter of the movement's signature vertical stripe canvases
- Thomas Downing (1928-1984) — First-generation member of the 1965 Washington Color Painters exhibition
- Howard Mehring (1931-1978) — First-generation member whose stained color paintings helped define the group
Example works
- Mountains and Sea — Helen Frankenthaler (1952)
- Alpha-Pi — Morris Louis (1961)
Sources
- Washington Color School - Wikipedia encyclopedia