Review: Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983) – Observer

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside New York Citya place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

Artists usually outgrow the movements that are associated with them. The term impressionism grew out of a derogatory description, and Donald Judd shunned the term minimalist. Moreover, youll find no Mark Rothko in the new show Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983) at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, because though he pioneered the painting of fields of color, he didnt consider himself to be a part of that discipline. That term better described those whose work followed the atomic bomb that was Abstract Expressionism.

The exhibition really is about the generation that comes after because they faced a dilemma, the museums director and curator and former Rothko Foundation head, Bonnie Clearwater, recently told the Miami New Times. They were all committed to abstract painting, and unlike the abstract expressionists who came before them and went through this whole process going from representational and expressionist art to surrealism and biomorphism, and ultimately to their resolved full-blown abstractionthis generation starts where that ends.

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What emerged from Abstract Expressionism was Pop Art, Minimalism, Op Art, Photorealism, the Black Art Movement, hard-edge abstraction and Color Field painting, of which this show offers almost fifty stellar examples by artists like Frank Stella, Lawrence Poons, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Morris Lewis, Helen Frankenthaler and Sam Gilliam, its title taken from a quote by Stella writing on Hans Hofmanns Gloriamundi (1963).

The show would seem to argue that Abstract Expressionism had all those other movements wrapped up into it and that once its Pandoras Box was opened, the Color Field discipline was free to luxuriate in palette experiments without all the emotional complexity or politics. The Gilliam paintings are wonderful examples from the 1970stie-dyes that intermingle to the point that they redefine groovy.

But the Nolands steal the show, namely THIS (1958-1959) and THAT (1958-1959), seven-foot squares with abstracted bullseyes that differ only in the vibrant color selection of their rings but still manage to tell completely different stories. And why do you always assume that everything is a target, man? If youre ever feeling the vibes too hard, you can usually count on Princetons own Frank Stella to knock some sense into you, but even hes getting into the hippie act for this show. Like Noland, his offerings are larger in scale. Theres Waskwaiu II [Variations on a Circle] (1968) and theres Sacramento No. 6 (1978), both of which show meticulous planning in their design and then outr choices for their colors. Stellas palette would become his own to the point you could remove it from the designs and still know whose it was.

Louis acrylic resins on canvas are also big and probably among the more intense works in the show. They appear to be giant curtains, behind which very different plays are about to be staged. Shout out to the Poonses, which build on the work of Jackson Pollock, free from the troubles and hypnotizing effect of the latter.

Fort Lauderdale isnt too far from Miami. If youre going down to Art Basel you should consider swinging through.

Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983) is on view at the NSU Art Museum through June 30, 2024.

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Review: Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983) - Observer