Color Field Painting

カラーフィールド・ペインティング / late 1940s–1960s / Style / Postwar Abstract Painting

Large continuous fields, soaked edges and few forms build a space of color that fills the entire surface and asks to be looked at for a long time.

Color Field Painting — Interior of the Rothko Chapel (CC BY-SA 4.0) · © Alan Islas
Interior of the Rothko Chapel (CC BY-SA 4.0) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · © Alan Islas
Color Field Painting — Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959, installation photo (Jennifer Mei, CC BY 2.0)
Morris Louis, Saraband, 1959, installation photo (Jennifer Mei, CC BY 2.0) · CC BY 2.0
Color Field Painting — Barnett Newman, Voice of Fire (National Gallery of Canada) — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · © HighlandFacts
Barnett Newman, Voice of Fire (National Gallery of Canada) — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · © HighlandFacts

At a glance

Visual cues

  • Vast color fields
  • Soaked contours
  • Few forms
  • Immersive scale

Best used for

  • Large walls in museums or places of worship where people stay a long time
  • Advertising for perfume or spirits where color itself has to carry the mood

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Dictionary entry

Type
Set type small at the margin so the field stays unbroken
Composition
Reduce to two or three forms sized beyond the field of view
Material
Thinned paint soaked into cloth so no edge ever hardens
Caution
Do not settle for a gradient background. Design how area, adjacent color, edge and viewing distance change the feeling, because big color at small scale never envelops and ends as a swatch.
Further study
Mark Rothko / Barnett Newman / Helen Frankenthaler / Sam Gilliam

Related entries

Often confused with

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Cite this entry

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https://indexstyle.org/styles/color-field-painting
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[Color Field Painting — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/color-field-painting)
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