The artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid made a name for themselves with the insight that lack of public interest in the art world is not the same as lack of interest in art. As new arrivals in the U.S., Komar and Melamid talked to their neighbors in Bayonne, N.J., and realized that people “really want art,” but not necessarily what comes out of the art world’s intense, insular dialogue between critics, curators, collectors and artists. While Komar and Melamid went on to construct a composite painting based on surveys of preferences, all you have to do is look around and see that there’s a lot more going on beyond what gets all the ink. The Frist’s current show highlights a group of major painters active during a time when art was supposedly abandoning painting.
The most common accounts of post-World War II art start with Abstract Expressionism and move on to Pop and Minimalism in the 1960s. This version of history seems to exclude the painters who responded to Abstract Expressionism with work that continued abstraction and stimulated the senses with rich color. This style, called Color Field, has been eclipsed in art history to the extent that this show is its first major survey since 1964. Whether figures like Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaler have a prominent place in art criticism, their paintings have been popular thanks to their appeal (and the ease with which they translate into reproductions).
This survey, organized by New York curator Karen Wilkin, is structured around the work of four critical figures in the movement—Frankenthaler, Louis, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland—augmented with predecessors and smaller samplings from contemporaries of the featured artists. The paintings are dramatic, many of them very large and, as advertised, alive with color. One of the goals of the artists was to explore the psychological and emotional effects of an encounter between the viewer and colors in intense combinations, presented as a kind of an immersion experience. Robert Motherwell’s “Open 165” puts down a long patch of blue broken by a rectangle of intense green, framed in black. Even more dramatically, Frankenthaler presents a wall of colors dominated by pinks in “Flood.” Viewers experience color as a presence that dominates their field of vision and takes on personality and energy.
These painters took the next step after Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline with something cooler, often using acrylics that would blend when poured over the canvas—not the aggressive brushstrokes and jarring contrasts of their predecessors. In their step away from expression and their sheer size, the paintings show an affinity to Minimalism, with its interest in the size of simple shapes relative to the human body. The dimensions of the paintings are integral to their sensory impact, and they place them in the range of monumental art. The scale of the works also points backward to the Baroque era, which produced a lot of art with similar dimensions. You can see the size and colors as a distillation of Baroque expressiveness, stripped of historical or mythological content.
The exhibit is strongly curated and cleverly installed. Wilkin chose four pieces by each of her four featured artists that stretch over the entire time period (except for Louis, who died in 1962). The samplings show the artists’ different development paths. Noland works his way through distinct phases of a geometrically based art, Olitski is the most varied stylistically, and Frankenthaler has the most consistent and confident voice. In works dating from 1957 through 1973, the continuity in her color palette is remarkable. By contrast, in two paintings from 1964, Olitski moves from a few simple forms in primary colors (“Cleopatra’s Flesh”) to a large expanse of translucent turquoise that bleeds into other shades (“Tin Green Lizze”).
The Frist Center’s first-floor gallery is well suited for many exhibits, and this one takes good advantage of the opportunities to frame works from room to room. The large pieces often fill the sight lines inside the next room, like the Kenneth Noland circle painting waiting for you as you look from one room dominated by Frankenthalers through the room with most of the Louis paintings. The installation also frames a Noland chevron painting with two Frank Stellas that have similar angularity and flank the passage into the room where the Noland hangs.
Wilkin’s selections show that the movement was not limited to New York or Washington, D.C. (this is a rare case where Washington was important in an international art movement), by including artists from California and Canada. She ends with three paintings by the Canadian Jack Bush, who was included in the critical 1964 exhibit from this group curated by the critic Clement Greenberg. Bush used geometries whose balance between formal distinctness and painterly brushstrokes seems in tune with later abstract painters like Sean Scully or Mary Heilman, who are still working today. These paintings close the exhibit with a suggestion that this style has established itself and become a sustained current in art.
Color Field painting enjoyed its highest critical profile in the early 1960s, but by extending the show’s time frame to 1975, Wilkin makes the point that these artists kept exploring the style, even if critics had moved on. Criticism has tended to divide recent art history into micro eras lasting a few years—a decade at most—which flies in the face of the way artists live and work. You can’t count on them to die a decently early death, and no good would come of an artist trying to adapt to each twist and turn in taste. Do you give artists their 15 minutes of novelty and then look away with embarrassment like you’re seeing a rock star long in the tooth? Shows like this encourage viewers and critics to take in the artist’s whole run. By ending with the subtle connection between Jack Bush and contemporary painters, Wilkin makes the case that, even in our constantly changing cultural environment, historical perspective reveals strong currents that are more long-lasting than they first seem.
