Post-Painterly Abstraction

Post-Painterly Abstraction A term coined by the critic Clement Greenberg to characterize a broad trend in American painting, beginning in the 1950s, in which abstract painters reacted in various ways against the gestural ‘painterly’ qualities of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg used the term as the title of an exhibition he organized at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. He took the word ‘painterly’ (Ger., malerisch) from Heinrich Wölfflin, who had discussed it in his book Principles of Art History. By it he understood ‘the blurred, broken, loose definition of colour and contour’; Post-Painterly Abstractionists, in contrast, moved towards ‘physical openness of design, or toward linear clarity, or toward both’. The characterization was never a very exact one, but essentially it described a rejection of expressive brushwork in favour of broad areas of unmodulated colour. The term thus embraces more precisely defined types of abstract art including Colour Field Painting and Hard-Edge Painting. Leading figures of the trend include Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella.