INTRODUCTION:
POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION
Post-painterly Abstraction is a movement given its name by the prominent American art critic, Clement Greenberg, in 1964, to distinguish a certain type of abstract painting of the 1960's and after from the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940's and 1950's. The paintings of the abstract expressionists often involved a very strong personal and emotional approach to painting, expressed through a "painterly" quality involving spontaneous and very visible and often vigorous brushwork.
Helen Frankenthaler, the most prominent of the second generation Abstract Expressionists, had begun to eliminate this "painterly" approach through the use of thin stains of paint on ungessoed (raw) canvas in the 1950's.
The artists classified as post-painterly abstractionists, influenced by Frankenthaler's groundbreaking work, approached painting with a more impersonal, austere, and intellectual aesthetic. Their paintings dealt with the formal elements of abstract painting: pure or often unmodulated areas of color; a flat, two-dimensional space within the painting; monumental scale; and in the work of Stella and occasionally Noland, the rejection of the traditional rectangle as the shape of the canvas itself.
They also rejected the painterly and spontaneous style of the Abstract Expressionists and instead they often stained raw canvas with thin wet paint to avoid any trace of brushstrokes. Among the styles included in the term post-painterly abstraction are "minimal painting" and "color-field painting."
Important painters associated post-painterly abstraction include Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella.