Post-Painterly Abstractionists rejected the cult of the individual that surrounded that monster of American art, Abstract Expressionism. Pollock, de Kooning, and their legion of imitators emphasized the personal emotional state of the artist, which often rendered itself in the individual brush... [more]

Post-Painterly Abstractionists rejected the cult of the individual that surrounded that monster of American art, Abstract Expressionism. Pollock, de Kooning, and their legion of imitators emphasized the personal emotional state of the artist, which often rendered itself in the individual brush gesture. The Post-Painterly Abstractionists, who usually took the form of Color Field painters, worked from an intellectual impulse that concerned formal elements: their paintings stay within the confines of two-dimensional space in an awareness of the dimensions of the canvas itself. The compositions are not intended to symbolize anything; they simply consider the patterns of color and shape and the optical effects caused by their interaction. These artists often created pieces monumental in scale and dramatic in their hue and geometry. Ellsworth Kelly translated mundane patterns into hard-edged, wall-sized canvases. The lights and darks of camouflage, the patterns found in the shadows of stair railing and window blinds -- all found their way into his compositions. He reduced them to their elemental forms and, often using chance to determine color sequence, translated their grids to formal, abstract paintings. Although real-world objects inspired the paintings, the compositions never overtly reference the outside world. Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland poured paint directly onto unprimed canvasses, allowing the expressive hues to saturate the cloth. Like Kelly, Noland based his compositions on found patterns, like signs, stripes, and targets. Mark Rothko, perhaps the best-known Color Field painter, suggested the spiritual sublime in his pigment-washed canvases. He moved toward Post-Painterly Abstraction after an early career of figurative painting; he soon came to believe that references to the physical world conflicted with his idea of the universal, supernatural "spirit of myth", which he saw as the meaning of art. [show less]