
Washington Color School Artworks
Started: 1958
Ended: 1980

Artworks and Artists of Washington Color SchoolThe below artworks are the most important in Washington Color School - that both overview the major ideas of the movement, and highlight the greatest achievements by each artist in Washington Color School. Don't forget to visit the artist overview pages of the artists that interest you. | |
![]() Artwork Images | Beginning (1958)Artist: Kenneth Noland Artwork description & Analysis: Aptly named, this work marks the beginning of Noland's Washington Color School style. Its basic geometric form explores the lively effects of contrasting and complementary colors, depicted in concentric circles, centered on a square canvas. Noland eschewed representation and pictorial depth in favor of focusing on the relationships of the colors. Noland compared his painting to music, saying, "painting without subject matter as music without words." The slight irregularity of the circles and the outer ragged halo of black paint give the work a kind of spontaneous energy, while the circular form draws the viewer's eye back toward the hypnotic center. Magna on canvas - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. |
![]() Artwork Images | Faces (1959)Artist: Morris Louis Artwork description & Analysis: This large canvas exemplifies Louis's Veil (1958-1960) series of paintings, each depicting a similar shape, rendered in translucent 'veils' or layers of magna paint diluted with turpentine. Rather than emphasizing a geometric shape like Noland, Louis creates a more organic form, not nested, but enfolded, while exploring color and transparency. As art historian Karen Wilkin explains, Louis and other Color Field painters believed "that a painting, no matter how apparently restrained, could address the viewer's whole being - emotions, intellect, and all - through the eye, just as music did through the ear." Acrylic resin (Magna) on canvas - Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. |
![]() Artwork Images | Insurrection (1962)Artist: Anne Truitt Artwork description & Analysis: This minimal and static object generates a dynamic energy that belies its simplicity. This large vertical sculpture, including the base, is divided asymmetrically into two shades of red, cleanly delineated from one another. As a result, the asymmetricality creates a kind of optical movement, with the dividing line both receding and projecting depending on one's perspective, and the two reds vie for foreground and background positions. Truit said, "Painted into color, this wooden structure is rendered virtually immaterial. The color is thus set free into space." Trained as a psychologist, she felt color had a psychological vibration, which could be clarified in an artwork, becoming an event, felt as a visual sensation. Acrylic on wood - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. |
![]() Artwork Images | Untitled (1962)Artist: Howard Mehring Artwork description & Analysis: This square canvas, symmetrically divided into concentric squares and employing a color palette of speckled blue, orange, and violet, displays Mehring's interest in the surface of color. The basic geometric form of the square becomes, by repetition and variations in size, a complex arrangement of interlocking shapes that draws the viewer's eye to the center. The use of blue in the center of the composition creates dynamic movement, as the adjacent areas, broken up by purples and oranges, have a zigzag effect. Acrylic on canvas - The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. |
![]() Artwork Images | Black Grey Beat (1964)Artist: Gene Davis Artwork description & Analysis: This painting, with its hard-edged stripes of equal width in different colors and shades, exemplifies Davis's emphasis on what he called the "color interval," the rhythmic effect created by the irregular appearance of color. Here yellow, red, green, and pink stripes pop vibrantly among black and grey stripes. Though the hard edge and uniform size of the stripes creates an orderly, almost calculated effect, the unpredictability of color creates the visual equivalent of jazz improvisation. He creates a complex schema of simplified forms to invite extended viewing and convey an unpredictable beat of spontaneity and play. Acrylic on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. |
![]() Artwork Images | Shoot (1964)Artist: Kenneth Noland Artwork description & Analysis: In the 1960s, Noland led the way as the Washington Color School moved toward a hard edge approach to their compositions. Having explored the concentric circle in hard-edged images like Birth (1961), he began to explore the chevron's V-shape, its straight lines of color outlined by thin lines of the neutral color of the canvas. The hard-edged, geometric form divides the canvas itself into triangles, two in neutral color on either side of the chevron's inverted triangular shape. Acrylic on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. |
![]() Artwork Images | Marmara (1968)Artist: Paul Reed Artwork description & Analysis: Reed titled this radically shaped canvas for a sea in Turkey. Trapezoids of various shapes in hues of red, orange, yellow, and brown surround a blue center, shaped almost like a key hole. Painted with matte and fluorescent pigment, the shapes create a sense of movement that lifts the overall shape off the wall, creating a dynamic, three-dimensional effect. Acrylic on canvas - D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York, New York |
![]() Artwork Images | Swing (1969)Artist: Sam Gilliam Artwork description & Analysis: With this innovative work, Gilliam stained then squeezed and folded a large sheet of canvas and hung it in draping folds. In doing so, he freed the color field from its frame. The work takes on a sculptural materiality, both organic in its folds and geometric in its four triangular points attached to the wall. Gilliam's intent was to make color move, taking on an intense physicality. Acrylic on canvas, aluminum - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. |
![]() Artwork Images | Sky Light (1973)Artist: Alma Thomas Artwork description & Analysis: A crackled and interlocking field of blue shapes on white canvas exemplifies Thomas's mosaic approach to creating an abstraction of luminous color. While avoiding any illusion of depth, the surface is energetic with darker and lighter intensities of blue, outlined and lit up by thin outlines of white. In the flat pictorial plane, the varying shapes evoke both a finely fractured piece of colored glass and a fractal, where an organic shape dissolves into similar shapes on an ever-smaller scale. As a result, the field conveys a sense of infinity, which led art critic Ken Johnson to call her "an incandescent pioneer." Acrylic on canvas - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden , Washington, D.C. |
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Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 12 Nov 2017. Updated and modified regularly.
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