Drifting Through Fields of Color
A Major Survey Offers a Fresh Look at Landmark American Art at a Cultural Intersection of Progress and Peril

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 2, 2008; Page M06

"Color as Field," at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, presents wall-size pictures that are about huge gestures in color and shape. In its heyday in the 1960s and early '70s, this kind of "color field" painting was the hot commodity in the art world, right at what seemed to be the center of the abstract avant-garde. And yet, within a bare few years, its pictures fell so far out of fashion that they've been neglected since. This touring exhibition -- incredibly, the first full survey of the color field movement -- aims to give us fresh perspective on them.

So when you're looking at these giant canvases, a microscope may be the tool to keep in mind.

Not because you need to get that close to what the pictures show. We'll save that for Vermeer or other finicky realists. What's "microscopic" about this massive abstract art is how the eye responds to it.

When you look through a microscope -- or a telescope, for that matter -- your eye is completely filled with what it sees, yet it also has no way to judge the scale. Are we talking a few blood cells, a clutch of gnats' eggs or a light-years-wide galaxy? Just working on the evidence at hand, an eye that's looking through a viewfinder can't tell you much about the things it sees. It's left both altogether absorbed and endlessly puzzled.

That's what happens when you immerse yourself in these abstract pictures.

A pattern of crossed lines on a canvas painted in 1974 by Kenneth Noland could be a swatch from a Scottish plaid. Or it could be an extreme close-up on a bare few threads from such a weaving. Or it could almost be an aerial view of the industrial park where the fabric was woven.

A 12-foot-wide blob by Helen Frankenthaler, called "Flood" and stained into a canvas in 1967, could be a drop of infected blood. Or it could be a pool of polluted water. Or it could be an entire oil spill.

The point isn't that, in looking at such pictures, we must decipher what their content "really" is. This art is as purely abstract as its makers insisted it was.

The point is that the human eye and mind evolved for spotting objects in the world -- things, say, to eat or not be eaten by. When that instinct is stymied, as in the works in "Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975," the eye and mind are left at sea in fascinating ways.

In the era covered in this exhibition -- beginning shortly before the Salk vaccine and ending a bit after the last moon landing -- that same fascination could also be provoked by certain novel kinds of scientific seeing. These paintings were made during our culture's last moment of full-blown scientific faith. Yet it was also the very moment when phrases such as "Silent Spring," "Love Canal" and "greenhouse effect" were starting to disturb the peace.

The huge, colorful abstractions that dominated this era in American art don't simply recall what it's like to look at scientific worlds beyond the normal human ken. They also evoke both the thrill and the unease that comes with that kind of looking. They give a powerful sense of a world that's there for the deciphering, as well as of our inability to make heads or tails of it.

The unease such pictures cause is partly hard-wired into us. A "normal" realistic image, whether painted or photographic, almost always features clues that help its viewers get their bearings. Just from looking at a still life, say, you can tell whether you're looking up or down on all the fruit and glassware that it shows. The picture itself tells you whether you would need to be far away from them or near for the scene to look the way it does. The human mind is miraculously good at figuring out all the spaces and objects implied in a picture, and our relation to them. Traditional European pictures, that is, leave us firmly planted in front of a world we understand. With "aberrant" pictures such as the ones in "Color as Field," those clues disappear and we're left floating in a void.

Our eyes want to find some there, there. They want some thing or space out in the world they can latch onto. But all they find is drifting, view-filling patterns they've never encountered before. Except maybe on TV in a science special.

Once you start thinking in these "scientific" terms, pictures in the show take on new sense. A circular abstraction by Noland becomes a view through a lens. A 1962 abstraction by Jules Olitski, in which one blob eats another while a third one waits its turn, seems overwhelmingly cellular. A 1967 canvas called "Green Web," by Washingtonian Sam Gilliam, could be a stained image of neural connections, tendrils of glowing yellow stretching across a dark-green ground. Or it could be the view out from Earth onto a distant nebula.

And yet, such laboratory echoes lead to readings that are so literal, so unsubtle, that it's almost tempting to write them off as pure coincidence. A more interesting hint of science can be spotted in these pictures less in what we see in them than in how they make us feel.

Not being able to see anything recognizable in them is part of that feeling.

"Han-San Cadence" is a vast mustard-yellow rectangle by Larry Poons, a full 6 feet by 12, peppered with an almost-even grid of ovoid dots in blue and green. It's orderly enough, at first glance, but it never lets on what there is to see in it, or how we are supposed to look at such a thing. Is the picture "about" its larger pattern, or is our interest to be born across it dot by dot? Do you want to stand far enough away to take in the whole thing and its edges, or so close that those edges fade from view? Are the visible nubs of its coarse canvas part of its "signal" or just irrelevant noise?

When you're looking at a traditional realistic picture, for instance by the great British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, such signal-to-noise issues all fall into place: You know where to stand and what it is to take in its whole landscape; you understand when you've moved in on its charming little dog; you know when you've come so close that you've given up the scene in favor of the brushstrokes and the weave that make the picture up. At any given point, you know how each part relates to the whole and what to make of both the parts and their totality. That kind of clear hierarchy of motif and meaning dissolves in Poons's color field abstraction.

After even a few seconds of looking, you suffer such a swarm of dotty orange and red afterimages that you can't even tell what colors are at stake -- this in a picture that seemed so clearly to start out as yellow, blue and green. You're not even sure where all its features lie in space: Move your head from side to side or change your point of focus, and dots zoom across the picture plane or buzz toward you, then away. Look away at a blank wall, and you've still got those damned spots in front of you.

This is modern, scientific looking, as viewed by the nonscientist: Such looking implies that the world is eminently knowable, yet gives us an imagery that means precisely nothing to the normal human mind. Science is supposed to make our place in the scheme of things clearer than ever, yet it's just as likely to leave the average Joe feeling more adrift in the universe. That's the kind of immersive, disconcerting experience that's at stake in the pictures in this show.

That's not just because they're abstract. Earlier European abstractions, slammed as "compositional" by the artists in this exhibition, had been built to the same, easily viewable scale as realistic easel pictures. And such earlier abstractions, by the likes of Mondrian and Klee, also felt like they'd been built around the same structural principles as realistic images. Their compositions seemed to have been abstracted from nature, rather than leaving normal nature entirely behind.

Or, if we do think we see nature in "Color as Field," it's a nature that's been so completely processed that it's lost all links to normalcy. A picture such as Friedel Dzubas's "Lotus," from 1962, is the kind of image where you'd say, "Doctor, that's inside of me ?" As with so many other pictures in this show, its colors are the false colors of science.

The diseased neurons we can imagine in Gilliam's green painting are yellow only for the sake of making them more fully visible. Or if we imagine that the picture's showing us a distant galaxy, its hues are imposed by the same technicians who add color to Hubble's stellar imagery, not registered from anything the eye could ever see.

Of course, none of this was mentioned or intended by the artists in this show. Most of them would have insisted that their art was truly and absolutely abstract and optical, not the tiniest bit referential or "literary," as they'd have put it. These pictures, they said, were only about color, shape, line and surface. Frank Stella, the most important figure in this show, coined the best line about the movement's art: "What you see is what you see."

The thing is, every era's got its way of seeing.