Color field  

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Color Field painting is an abstract style that emerged in the 1950s after Abstract Expressionism and is largely characterized by abstract canvases painted primarily with large areas of solid color. An alternate but less frequently encountered term for this style is chromatic abstraction.

Taking its example from other European modernists like Miró, the color field movement encompasses several decades from the mid 20th century through the early 21st century. Color field painting actually encompasses three separate but related generations of painters. Commonly used terms to refer to the three separate but related groups are abstract expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and lyrical abstraction. Some of the artists made works in all three eras, that relate to all of the three styles. Color field pioneers such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, John Ferren, Adolph Gottlieb, and Robert Motherwell are primarily thought of as abstract expressionists. Artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland were of a slightly younger generation, or in the case of Morris Louis aesthetically aligned with that generation's point of view; that started out as abstract expressionists but quickly moved to post-painterly abstraction. While younger artists like Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Ronnie Landfield, Dan Christensen, began with post-painterly abstraction and eventually moved forward towards a new type of expressionism, referred to as lyrical abstraction. Many of the artists mentioned, as well as many others, have practiced all three modes at one phase of their careers or another. During the later phases of color field painting; as reflections of the zeitgeist of the late 1960s (in which everything began to hang loose) and the angst of the age (with all of the uncertainties of the time) merged with the gestalt of post-painterly abstraction, producing lyrical abstraction which combined precision of the color field idiom with the malerische of the abstract expressionists. During the same period of the late 1960s, and early 1970s in Europe, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and several other painters also began producing works of intense expression, merging abstraction with images, incorporating landscape imagery, and figuration that by the late 1970s was referred to as Neo-expressionism.

See also

• Abstract art
• Abstract Imagists
• Concrete art
• Hard-edge painting
• Lyrical abstraction
• Modern art
• Post-painterly abstraction
• Warming stripes (data visualization technique using the color field concept)
• Washington Color School
• Western painting