Todd Suomela
Thus emerged the chief form of American museum art in the early '60s: The Watercolor That Ate the Art World. Of course, one could hardly come 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 canvases, like students of the Talmud disputing a text, before issuing their communiques about the Inevitable Course of Art History to the readers of Artforum.
abstract-art art modernism 1940s 1950s 1960s artist review louis morris
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