Drifting Through Fields of Color

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

"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.