Because not every post can be about cooking.

It's important that I talk about other things on my blog so that my activities seem more exciting than the occasional perfectly cooked meal. In the spirit of this, I wanted to run through the current exhibit out at the Frist Center, Color As Field.

Through the Frist newsletter I heard about a few free lectures on the current exhibition, and resolved to give them a try before seeing the art itself. The lecture did well in setting the stage, though some of the most interesting things came from follow-up googling about some of the artists. The Color As Field movement raises eyebrows from the more traditional mindset, coming straight out of the 50s/60s with a dedication to intuition, lack of form, and... well... color. These are the artists who poured paint on rather than brushed it. Who did giant works composed of vivid or overlapping blobs and rivers of acrylics. Who used squeegees, putty knives, gravity, their hands - pretty much anything but a traditional paint brush to create something. Call it all nonsense if you like, say that its notoriety came entirely from one lone art critic's flight of fancy, but it does help to understand where they were coming from and what they were trying to achieve.

From the rejection of form to the limits of formlessness.
Previous Abstraction styles had moved away from work that directly represented real life, but it still held to an altruistic need for some kind of recognizable form, be it human or otherwise. A sort of hyper emotionalism could be felt in their works. Color as Field was one of the movements that craved something more austere and shrugged off the last vestiges of desire to be representational of something else. A description from the catalog for the exhibit put it nicely: "While scrupulously avoiding anything resembling psychological symbolism, the ‘post-painterly’ [Color Field] conception of ‘cool’ included the belief that a painting, no matter how apparently restrained, could address the viewer’s whole being — emotions, intellect, and all — through the eye."

This gives us a clue to what all these works were getting at. Obviously, there was a large emphasis on figuring out just how much color alone can convey - but the underlying goal for these artists was escaping all preconceived notions and exploring the limits of the bare essentials of a painting (two dimensional space and color). How far can those two essentials take you until it just doesn't work anymore? How big can a painting be until it's no longer a painting? How many colors? How few? They were very into the idea of "all-overness," of paintings that seem bigger than the canvas that holds them. More than one of them donned blindfolds in an effort to break themselves of conventions and to retrain into relying entirely upon subconscious instinct. The painters often borrowed language from the musical realm, painting "in the key of green," and their work was likened to jazz improv sessions (interesting how musical and artistic movements seem to coincide). The results range from vivid and powerful to murky (literally) and difficult to connect with. One painter in particular had works that hit both ends of the spectrum for me. Jules Olitski, who turns out to be a very fascinating and charming man. A tragic younger life led him to a deep depression and insecurity where he rarely spoke and even attempted suicide, yet he gradually emerged to become one of the more well-spoken artists with an honesty and sense of humor about himself and his profession.

As you know, it's not cool these days to acknowledge any connection with previous art. What a hunger for immaculate conceptions among some of our artists. When did this begin? I remember reading a piece by one of the eminences of Minimalism in which he appeared to be claiming that he and his co-Minimalists had given birth by themselves to themselves: their art owed nothing to the past or present, nothing to no one. For shame; even the Holy Virgin admitted some contact from some source. Of course tradition can be intimidating; we can influence ourselves right into academic paralysis, which is probably what Emerson was warning his contemporaries against: "Carry not the corpses of yesteryear on your back..." Take what you can use from the past and throw out the rest. Keep going back and you'll find more and more to take and maybe more and more to get rid of. It seems the tradition that fathers you is the one you most want to transform; it's the one you bounce off against time and again until you made something of your own. This creation (call it your vision) may not look at all related to its father, and the more different it looks the more likely it will get put down, especially if it's good.
~ Jules Olitski

What to say to a nice neighbour of mine, a man who hasn't the foggiest notion as to why Rembrandt is in a different league than Ben Shahn, but who feels free to jeer and go on about "that phony Jackson Pollock and the rest of them fakes"? ... I was foolish enough to point out to him that Rembrandt painted some of the most original paintings of his time, but if he were alive today he would not be painting Rembrandts as we know them.
~ Jules Olitski

There is value in long years of obscurity, if one doesn't go insane or suicidal, in that, simply because nobody is looking, the habit of fooling around and trying things out gets ingrained.
~ Jules Olitski

It's time for a few Color-As-Field heavy hitters (click on their pictures to go to a slide show of some of their other works - not all of which are at the Frist mind you).

Helen Frankenthaler
Generally acknowledged to be the source of the movement, when Noland and Louis went to her studio and saw Mountains and Sea they left full of ideas. Louis famously called her work "the bridge between Pollock and what was possible." Color as Field (or if you really want to impress someone you can use it's awful synonym - Post-Painterly Abstraction) was born.


Mountains and Sea - the face that launched a thousand ships, as it were.


Morris Louis
It's hard unless you've seen them, but it's necessary to really get the scale of his work. The one below (similar to my favorite of his at the Frist) is about 10' by 20' or so. Louis went through droughts with his painting, destroying many works that he created and struggling with painter's-block, for lack of a better term. He always seemed to emerge from them and ultimately gave Color-Field some of it's most defining paintings. Unfortunately Louis, much like his paintings, took a bath in the world's first acrylic paint - Magna. His longterm high-level exposure to this rather toxic paint is thought to be the reason he died fairly young of lung cancer.


Alpha Pi


Jules Olitski
Remember my pal Jules?


Julius and Friends - this one lended some credibility in my mind to how riveting color alone can be. I felt completely blown away by this huge piece (as tall as me). His oft' quoted craving in painting was to capture color. "I want to spray color in the air and have it stay there."

For those who have seen the exhibit (or haven't, but still have an opinion), I'd be curious to know your thoughts on it. Knowing they held that art made sheerly "for the eye" is capable of grabbing you intellectually and emotionally - did you find any painting that did that? Did they fall off the edge of the limits they were exploring, to the point that their works no longer qualify as "paintings" to you?

The museum flyer says: "The Color Field painters believed that the source of creativity was the unconscious and that the artist's role was to make the unseen visible, rather than to depict what could be seen." I was struck by this quote and the similarity it held to what some theologians claim is the reason for humanity - to make the unseen visible.