Principles of Modernism: Freeing Color

Jacques Louis David

Cupid and Psyche, 1817

Color defines form. A skilled painter like David uses

lush shades of red and orange to give the illusion of flesh and fabric.

Modernists believed that color must be freed

from that service.

Henri Matisse 

Woman with a Hat, 1905

Matisse's painting scandalized the art world.

Color was doing very little work here in defining form and image.

Matisse seemed to be celebrating color for itself.

Why was her nose green?

Wassily Kandinsky

Squares with Concentric Circles, 1913

The next step was abandoning image for abstract shape.

Josef Albers

Homage to the Square, 1959

And then it was a slippery slope to abandoning everything but color.

Barnett Newman

Concord, 1949

Mark Rothko

Orange and Yellow, 1956

Helen Frankenthaler

Bilbao, 1979

Louis Morris,

 Number 99, 1960

These abstractionists from the mid-20th-century were known as color field painters.

Ad Reinhardt

Black Paintings from the 1960s

And then abandoning color....

Color, once freed, left the building.