Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007

DENVER — From November 2007 to February 2008, the Denver Art Museum is showing Color as Field, an exhibition curated by the American Federation of Art made up of about 40 large works from Color Field School painters like Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Frank Stella.

If you’ve seen one of these paintings, like a Morris Louis, you know what fits in this genre: raw canvas stained when thinned colorful paint was poured over it. The beauty of this collection of work is the many variations of this style: Frankenthaler does bleedying shapes of color, Louis does pours from top to bottom, Jules Olitsky rolls the paint around the canvas and in addition, the curator has included a Mark Rothko, a Clyfford Still and some Hans Hoffman paintings whose concepts were conceived before 1950 and reside in the large, historically important Abstract Expressionism movement. The Frank Stella and Kenneth Nolan paintings are more examples of what color field morphed into — Hard Edge paintings that perpetuated into the 1970s. Color Field was a small movement in between Abstract Expressionism and Hard Edge that produced big, beautiful color paintings with no recognizable subject, a movement that competed with the Pop Art movement for national prominence and probably lost.

The last time I saw a great show in the space currently filled with Color Field paintings, called the Stanton Gallery, was in the 1970s. Since then the DAM turned the old cafeteria into its blockbuster show space and cut up the space in the Stanton, showed some contemporary art from its collection in little cubicles, portioned off a place for a video or two and generally misused the very high-ceilinged gallery designed for the art from the 50s through the 70s — abstract expressionism, pop, and this. The hanging of this show made me nostalgic about the James Rosenquist Retrospective I’d seen there. Finally, this color field show was making good use of the space, again.

I must have had an obvious smile on my face because the museum guard started asking me if I liked the work, and to guess when the Rothko was made. I guessed late in his career, and he confirmed it. Then he came to see me in the grand finale space with the Louis’ and Frankenthaler’s and told me that a very frail old woman had shown up on opening night and was taking pictures. She was told she couldn’t photograph, and she asked, can I take pictures if the paintings are mine? and the guard called the big desk to find out if Ms. Frankenthaler could take some pictures.

I was allowed also to take a picture, but not of the work, because it wasn’t mine. I was able to take a picture of my pencil that had fallen out of my pocket. I’d thought I lost it and I’m patting my pockets when a different guard said, “at your feet.” There was my pencil standing upright with lead embedded in the wood floor. (See photo.)

Meanwhile, there are a couple people in the gallery that don’t quite get so interested in pictures that don’t have any subjects. Why are these so interesting, I am asked and think I’m explaining the obvious that this is an extension of Abstract Expressionism, and there are mostly blank looks; a woman walks across the gallery and asks if I can explain abstration to her friend, too. These paintings are made actively by the painters, I said, and when you look at them you have to be active, too, looking and letting yourself have an emotional reaction, not something intellectual, the painter has eliminated the possibility that you will just stop looking and say, “Yeah, that’s a horse.”

I’m dumbfounded to think that people in this day and age don’t know the movement, Abstract Expressionism, which actually put American Art on the world map. My son says something like couldn’t any kid do that, and I think I’m in a movie like Back to the Future, and no one has seen this stuff before. These painters are being put down for making crap that is just kids smearing around finger paints. Then I realize that every one of the paintings in the space looks like wall paper or some kind of graphic design project. The simple splashes of paint are common, today, they've been absorbed by design, and someone who doesn’t keep the history of contemporary art in their head (either because they are too young or never studied art) doesn’t see them as anything but note cards, or screen backgrounds.

The idea of standing in front of a painting for a minute and letting it give its impact is uncommon. Art at someone’s house is a photograph or some generic colors splashed on canvas in the shape of a vase of flowers or something else recognizable, probably bought at Bed, Bath and Beyond while shuffling through a bin as fast as possible to get a good deal and a color that works in the room. I realized I had a sense of history that other people didn’t have. I felt like Julia Child drinking a newish Bordeaux and being able to compare it to the 1949 she’d drunk in 1955.

One of my relatives said she liked the color field paintings; they were pretty. Yeah, Color Field is usually pretty compared to ugly images of ugly things pasted together to describe the state of life in the world today that make up much of today’s painting that is intended to shock rather than impress with beauty. I agreed that they were pretty, and a docent who had some education in art protested that “pretty” was a nasty word in contemporary art, and meant the work was meaningless and decorative. She was right; she had her art-ese down. Pretty may be why Color Field lost out to Pop Art, a 60s movement with big impactful ideas.

An artist can’t make a color field painting today (but my brother-in-law wants to make one; he needs some big color in the entryway and can’t find one he can afford at Bed, Bath and Beyond). It’s been done; so have soup cans. And horses. We apparently can’t get enough of dogs, horses and of course the human figures and faces. While as babies we’re programmed to look for the human face, we don’t instinctually know how to look at abstraction. Maybe we’d enjoy clouds more if we did learn this.

Exhibition itinerary: Denver Art Museum (November 9, 2007—February 3, 2008); Smithsonian American Art Museum (February 29—May 26, 2008); Frist Center for the Visual Arts (June 20 —September 21, 2008). In Denver, the show resides in the Geo Ponte-designed original Denver Art Museum on the first floor in the Stanton Gallery, and includes five painting hung in the new wing of the museum (opened in Oct 2006) on the third floor.

Terry Talty is the Art Tourist, traveling to see art exhibition as if they were the new Seven Wonders of the World.