Washington Color School

About

In the 1950s artists in Washington built a distinct abstraction from colour alone. Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, after seeing Helen Frankenthaler's stained canvases in New York, began pouring thinned paint onto raw cotton duck so that pigment sank into the weave instead of sitting on top. Louis's Veils and Unfurleds came out of that discovery before his death in 1962, while Noland moved on to targets and chevrons.

The name comes from The Washington Color Painters (1965), a show that also included Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring and Paul Reed. Look for flat, unmodulated colour, repeated units and stained or taped edges: Davis's vertical stripes, Downing's grids of dots. Sam Gilliam freed stained canvas from its stretcher and hung it in folds from 1968, and Alma Thomas, who painted full-time after retiring as a schoolteacher, built shimmering fields from short dabs of colour.