Drifting Through Fields of Color

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.