Let's Get to the Saturation Point

"Color field painting" is yet another artisticism that isn't. It isn't, that is, a term that points to a coherent artistic movement with clear goals and shared ideals and a unified way of doing things. At best, the phrase picks out a loosely connected bunch of abstract painters who explored highly simplified color and form, mostly in the United States and mainly from the later 1950s to the mid-'70s. (Many of these artists kept on working beyond then; a number are still alive. But those dates bracket their shared moment of importance and influence.)

The exact roster isn't clear. Most people would agree that Morris Louis (1912-62), Kenneth Noland (b. 1924) and Gene Davis (1920-85), founders of the movement's crucial Washington branch, were at the center of the color field school, alongside Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) and Jules Olitski (1922-2007) and the Canadian Jack Bush (1909-77). You'd get debate, however, on whether Barnett Newman (1905-1970) was a member or a precursor. Or whether Frank Stella (b. 1936) might be more important for minimalism and even conceptualism than for the color school. Or was he sui generis?

The color fielders tended to soak their pigments right into their huge canvases, rejecting the traces of the artist's hand that Jackson Pollock and his peers had reveled in before them. Except when, like Larry Poons (b. 1937), a color field artist chose to toss on handfuls of thick paint. In general, Poons might be thought of as the Color Outfielder.

The work of color fielders such as Davis and Stella -- assuming Stella is in the gang -- is sometimes also called hard-edge abstraction. That's because of all the masking tape such artists used to keep their pictures tidy, which makes their art as different as could be from the mostly gloppy forms of Louis and Frankenthaler. (Noland and Bush could go either way.)

All these artists said they cared most about their pictures' purely optical effects. They tended to avoid discussing any kind of metaphorical or even emotional content, preferring perceptual and sometimes almost technical accounts of their art. In this, they were following the lead of the man who was the movement's absolutely central figure, even though he wasn't even an artist. That was the writer Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), one of the most influential critics ever, who either discovered or encouraged all these painters. He put them into shows he curated and onto the walls of dealers and collectors he advised, and he wrote about them in his landmark texts on art.

For a few years to either side of 1970, the color field seemed to be the only place to be in the art world. But video, performance, political and identity art were all there in the wings, waiting to take off. Once they did, Greenberg and his color fielders almost instantly became the worst of the rear guard, and their art has barely had attention since. The current show should help to put it back in play.

Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975 was curated by Karen Wilkin for the American Federation of Arts. Its 39 pictures are on view through May 26 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at Eighth and G streets NW. Call 202-633-1000 or visithttp://www.americanart.si.edu.