Colour as Field: From Rothko's Chapel to the Spray Gun

In 1964 John and Dominique de Menil asked Mark Rothko to make a place for meditation and prayer in Houston, and gave him control over the whole environment. He finished the paintings in 1967: fourteen large canvases for the walls, with four alternates. He never went to Houston and never saw them hung. Rothko died in 1970, and the chapel opened in February 1971.

The Rothko Chapel is the furthest point of an idea that ran through American painting for two decades: that colour, spread across a large enough surface, could be the entire subject of a picture rather than the dress worn by a drawing. Critics called it Color Field painting. It was never a club with members, and the artists most closely tied to it disagreed about almost everything except the scale of their canvases.

The first generation

Tate’s summary of the term names three painters at its root, all working in this way from about 1950: Mark Rothko (1903 to 1970), Barnett Newman (1905 to 1970) and Clyfford Still (1904 to 1980). What they share is the large area of relatively flat, single colour. What divides them is nearly everything else.

Rothko was born in 1903 in the Russian empire, in what is now Latvia, and arrived in Portland, Oregon, with his family in 1913. He studied at Yale from 1921 to 1923, then moved to New York and, according to the Rothko Chapel, became a painter almost by accident after walking into an art class while waiting for a friend. Social realism and then surrealism came first. Only in the late 1940s did he settle on the format now synonymous with his name: soft-edged rectangles of one colour floating on a ground of another.

He insisted that painting was a private exchange between the work and the person in front of it, and as a rule he refused to show in large group exhibitions. He also warned against reading his pictures as exercises in harmony: “if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point,” he said, in a remark the chapel quotes because he never explained the chapel paintings themselves.

Those paintings show how far he took the idea. He mixed dry pigments himself, boiling them with rabbit skin glue, egg and oil emulsion and polymer, and applied the paint with house painter’s brushes four to six inches wide. The north wall canvases each measure 180 by 297 inches. The canvases first read as black; the chapel notes that colour emerges as the eyes adjust. Rothko specified that the room be lit only by daylight.

Newman’s presence at the chapel is outside it. Facing the building stands his sculpture Broken Obelisk, conceived in 1963 and fabricated in 1967 at Don Lippincott’s works in Connecticut. It is 26 feet tall. The de Menils dedicated it to Martin Luther King Jr. Of the three original casts, the others are at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle.

Still and the refusal

Clyfford Still took the opposite view of public life. Where Rothko wanted control of a room, Still wanted control of everything. He began with outdoor scenes, people and machinery and moved towards shape, colour and line alone, working on very large canvases intended to absorb the viewer. He gave his paintings no titles, so that nobody would be told what to see.

He also believed that his work could be understood only in large groups, ideally as a whole, and wrote that belief into his will. His estate, roughly 830 paintings and about 2,300 works on paper together with photographs and papers, was to go in its entirety to an American city willing to build a museum for his art alone. After his death in 1980 the collection stayed sealed from public and scholars. Around twenty cities competed. In 2004 his widow, Patricia, chose Denver, after the mayor, John Hickenlooper, accepted the will’s conditions. The Clyfford Still Museum opened on 18 November 2011.

A painting poured on the floor

The second generation began with a technical decision. In 1952 Helen Frankenthaler, then in her early twenties, laid a length of raw, unprimed canvas on her studio floor and poured thinned paint directly onto it, working from every side. The result, Mountains and Sea, has no brushed skin of paint at all. The colour sinks into the cloth and becomes part of it.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation credits the painting with an immediate effect on the painters who became the Color Field group, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland above all. What they took from it was a method that removed the hand. A stain has no stroke and no impasto, and it does not record a gesture in the way that Rothko’s wide brush did.

Tate draws the line between the generations here. The later painters, it says, set aside the emotional, mythic or religious content that mattered to the first, and rejected the personal, gestural brushwork of earlier abstraction. In 1964 the critic Clement Greenberg organised an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of thirty one artists under the title Post-Painterly Abstraction, and his phrase has stuck to them since.

Louis, Noland and the open centre

Morris Louis (1912 to 1962) pushed the stain further than anyone. In the series known as the Unfurleds he poured thinned acrylic down unprimed canvas and tilted the support to steer each stream. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s Alpha Tau, dated 1960 to 1961, is 102 inches high and 19 feet 6 inches wide. Rivulets of colour run diagonally down from the left and right edges and stop, leaving a broad expanse of bare canvas between them. The middle of the painting, the place where a picture traditionally puts its subject, is empty. Tate holds another of his large poured canvases, Alpha-Phi of 1961.

Kenneth Noland (1924 to 2010) is the other painter the Frankenthaler Foundation names. Tate lists him with Frankenthaler and Louis among the second generation active from about 1960, alongside Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam. In Britain, the same decade produced its own colour painters, Robyn Denny, John Hoyland and Richard Smith among them.

The spray gun

Jules Olitski (1922 to 2007), born in Russia, removed the last trace of the tool. Love Accepted, a tall narrow canvas from 1965 at the Princeton University Art Museum, was made with a spray gun. Acrylic paint went on as a mist, building fields of colour that the museum describes as almost uninterrupted by shape, structure or line. By varying the density of the spray Olitski could shift the saturation of the colour across the surface by degrees, and the museum compares the effect to fog: deep, without measurable distance, and oddly without body.

Love Accepted dates from 1965. In the same years, Rothko was boiling pigment in rabbit skin glue for a room in Houston that would be lit only by the sun. One painter had found a way to leave no mark on the canvas at all; the other was still building each surface by hand, four to six inches at a time, for a building he would never enter.