Friedel Dzubas

Post Painterly Abstraction is a tendency of post Abstract Expressionism, distinct from gestural abstraction, or action painting. It was pioneered in the late 1940s by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, who were all independently searching for a style of abstraction which might provide a modern, mythic art, and express a yearning for transcendence and the infinite. To achieve such style, they abandoned all suggestions of figuration and instead exploited the expressive power of color by deploying it in large fields, which might envelope the viewer when seen at close quarters. Post Painterly Abstraction emerged out of the attempts of several artists to devise a modern art, seeking to connect with the primordial emotions locked in ancient myths. Rather than the symbols themselves, they sought a new style, which would do away with any suggestion of illustration.1

Post Painterly Abstraction is a term coined by formalist art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he organized for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.
Greenberg disliked the label "Color Field" which had been applied to some of the art that he admired: “Why, I don't know; after all, most art labels are the work of journalists and few are descriptive in any meaningful way.”2
The phrase Post Painterly Abstraction stuck and it came to be used as a label for any art that Clement Greenberg was presumed to advocate. He did the most to explore it in his 1955 essay, "American-Type Painting," first published in Partisan Review in 1955, in which he argued that Still, Newman and Rothko had consummated a tendency in modernist painting to apply color in large areas or fields.3

Clement Greenberg considered this tendency of creating color field particularly important since it returned to what he saw as one of the most important innovations of the Impressionists - the suppression of value contrasts (contrasts of light and dark hues), to describe depth and volume.
Many Abstract Expressionists adopted an "all-over" approach to composition - approaching the canvas as a field, rather than as a window in which to depict figures - but none pushed this as far as the color field painters.

Greenberg himself described Post Painterly Abstraction as being typically linear in design, bright in color, devoid of detail and incident, and inclined to draw the eye beyond the limits of the canvas. Above all it was anonymous in execution, reflecting the painter's desire to abandon the drama and emotionalism of the older forms of Abstract Expressionism.4

The 1960s soon undermined Greenberg's concept of Post Painterly Abstraction. If there had been a single identifiable trend, it quickly fragmented into a series of competing schools, as painters pursued their separate goals. By 1973, the formalism of such styles as Color Field Painting was soon replaced by the Anti-Formalism of movements like Pop Art and Minimalism.

The styles embraced by the term Post Painterly Abstraction include: (i) Color Field Painting, illustrated by the works of pioneers Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Hans Hofmann; (ii) Hard-Edge Painting, illustrated by the works of abstract painters like Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Jack Youngerman; (iii) Washington Color Painters, such as Gene Davis, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland; (iv) Systemic Painting, which covered the work of Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, as well as Stella; (v) Minimal Painting, which referred to pictures by Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, and Robert Ryman. And Color Stain Painting, exemplified by Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski and Friedel Dzubas.5