Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what is nakedly and explicitly at stake . . . is nothing less than the continued existence of painting as a high art." It contained "unimagined possibilities for the future of painting." One chews on this, moving from one sweetly august canvas to the next, enjoying the floods and diaphanous veils of color, the sheaves of burning stripes, the technical control, and marvels once more at the unpredictability of shifts in the pecking order of the American art world. Whatever painting may be argued to depend on today, it is not the lyric disembodied stain. Its possibilities for the future turned...
...painting had only one way to go. No more figures, organic symbolism or utopian geometry; no more gestural surfaces, tonal structure or cubist layering of space. In future, art would hang onto the spread-out, expansive quality of Pollock's work while refreshing it with a new intensity of color, inspired by Matisse. At the end of the purge you would have a clipped but radiant discourse of pure hue, fixed by an exaggerated pictorial flatness, done in thinned translucent washes that became the surface. Louis' direct inspiration for this was an early canvas by Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains...
...right out with it and say the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (quite apart from the thousands of yards of lyric acrylic on unprimed duck done by their many forgotten imitators) were basically huge watercolors. But there was little in the soak-stain methods of color-field painting that did not seek and repeat watercolor effects. The big difference lay in the size, the curtness and (sometimes) the grandeur of the image, and in the scrutiny it received from Greenberg's disciples, rocking and muttering over the last grain of pigment in the weave of these...
Instead, Louis sought a language of impersonal nuances. He found it in a complicated process of pleating the canvas and flooding it with runnels of diluted color, wash after wash, never a brush mark in sight. He "drew" his shapes by manipulating the effects of gravity on liquid. This certainly eliminated the traces of the expressive hand and gave his surfaces a sweet, frictionless clarity. It was also chancy in the extreme, since it courted the possibility of turning the image into a decorative Rorschach blot. But Louis destroyed much of his own work, editing heavily, and the sense...
...assault on the individual rights of Blacks. At issue is the "ethical dilemma" faced by a Washington, D.C. jewelry store owner who wonders whether to admit a young Black man at the front-door buzzer. Henkin defends the rights of the individual not to be judged by his color, but he misses the preeminent point to be made here...