CategoriesStyles and Movements
Post-Painterly Abstraction
American abstract painting of the late 1950s and 1960s that replaced gestural brushwork with open colour, stained canvas and clean edges.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Post-Painterly Abstraction are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The critic Clement Greenberg borrowed the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin's distinction between the painterly and the linear when he organised an exhibition titled Post Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. He meant abstraction that had moved past the loaded brush and visible gesture of Willem de Kooning and his followers towards openness, clarity and colour.
The show gathered about thirty painters. Helen Frankenthaler poured thinned paint onto unprimed canvas in Mountains and Sea (1952), a staining method Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland took up after visiting her studio in 1953. Louis let veils and rivulets of paint run down his canvases; Noland painted targets and chevrons; Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella used crisp, hard-edged shapes; Jules Olitski later sprayed mists of colour. Look for flat surfaces, colour soaked into the weave or held by clean edges, and little trace of the hand.
Related artists
More in Styles and Movements
Post-War American Art
Post-War European Art
Post-World War I European Classicism
Post-World War II School of Paris
Postminimalism
Pre-Raphaelites
Pre-World War II School of Paris
Precisionism
Process Art
Progressive Artists' Movement
Purism
Relational Aesthetics
Renaissance
Rinpa School
Rococo Art and Design
