COLOR-FIELD PAINTING

COLOR-FIELD PAINTING (c. 1950). The idea is to use color apart from drawing, apart from shape, and apart from shading, until it acquires a purely visual status. However, in contrast to monochromic painting, most color-field work involves at least two colors, which prompt surprising retinal responses, such as ambiguous figure-ground reversals, usually along the sharply delineated border between the colors. The last fact prompted the epithet “hard-edge abstraction,” which is also used to describe…