Color Field

"The gesture today [c. 1965 in America] is surely more purely abstract than it was. There is a certain moment when one can look so pure that the result is emptiness – many readings of a work of art are eliminated and you are left with one note that may be real and pure but it’s only that, one shaft. For example, the best Mondrian's, Newman's, Noland's, or w:Louis Morris' are deep and beautiful and get better and better. But I think that many of the camp followers are empty."

"The important thing is that Clyff Still – you know his work? – and Rothko, and I – we've changed the nature of painting.. ..I don't mean there aren't any other good painters. Bill [= Willem the Kooning ] is a good painter, but he's a 'French' painter [by following the more aesthetic French influence). I told him so, the last time I saw him after his last show.. ..all those pictures in his last show start with an image. You can see it even though he's covered it up, or tried to.. .Style – that's the French part of it. He has to cover it up with style.."

"My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen is there. It really is an object.. ..and anyone who gets involved enough in this, finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is, that he’s doing; he is making a thing."

"I still, when I judge my own pictures (either while I'm working or after I think it's finished) determine if they work in a certain kind of space through shape or color. I think all totally abstract pictures – the best ones that really come off – Newman, Pollock, Noland – have tremendous space; perspective space despite the emphasis on flat surface. For example, in Noland a band of yellow in relation to a band of blue and one of orange can move in depth although they are married to the surface. This has become a familiar explanation, but few people really see and feel it that way.. ..in my work, because of color and shape a lot is read in the landscape sense.."

"Ken Noland could use concentric circles; he'd want to get them in the middle [of the painting] because it's the easiest way it get them there, and he want them there in the front, on the surface of the canvas. If you're that much involved with the surface of anything, you're bound to find symmetry the most natural means."

"I don't know what Color Field painting means. I think it was probably invented by some critic, which is okay, but I don't think the phrase means anything. Color Field painting? I mean, what is color? Painting has to do with a lot of things. Color is among the things it has to do with. It has to do with surface. It has to do with shape, It has to do with feelings which are more difficult to get at."

"The artworks of the so called Color Field painters dramatically enlarged the meaning of the label 'Abstract Expressionism', but through the clarifying lens of hindsight, they also seem to prefigure ideas.. ..of the loosely associated, aesthetically and chronologically divers group who came to be categorized under the rubric 'Color Field'. These were the painters – among them, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski – whose work was include in the exhibition 'Post Painterly Abstraction' [Los Angeles, 1964, curated by Clement Greenberg."

"What sets the best Color Field paintings apart [from Abstract Expressionism ] is the extraordinary economy of means with which they manage not only to engage our feelings but also to ravish the eye. At times, it can seem as if the artist's goal was to see how stripped-down a picture could be before it ceased to be interesting to look at."

"In 1953, Noland and Morris Louis travelled to New York to see galleries and studios and to visit Greenberg, whom Noland had met in 1950 at the legendary Black Mountain College and continued to see frequently.. ..who arranged for them to see the new work of the young, virtually unknown Frankenthaler, in her absence. Following Frankenthaler's example, the two painters began to experiment with staining [the canvas] on their return to Washington."