Spilling Over @ the Whitney

While in New York recently, I visited a show at the Whitney, "Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s". Quoting the posted text:

"Drawn entirely from the Whitney's collection, this exhibition gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. During this period, many artists adopted acrylic paint – a newly available, plastic-based medium  – and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues."

Here are five of the paintings I most enjoyed:

Kenneth Noland,  New Day,  1967
Noland painted on raw canvas, allowing the paint to sink into the surface.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Wait, 1967
This series, developed from 1950 to 1976, eventually encompassed more than one
thousand separate artworks.

Again, quoting from the text on the label:

"[Albers] would select one of four set layouts, all of which were symmetrical and oriented toward the bottom edge. He then applied each color ... from the center out, using a knife to spread paint straight from the tube. Albers' technique allowed him to use the same form to create vastly different experiences, and to explore the distinction between 'physical fact and psychic effect.' Across the series, color combinations affect not only how we see individual hues but also how we perceive space and form, with some squares seeming to leap forward while others recede."

Helen Frankenthaler, Orange Mood, 1966

"In Orange Mood,  Helen Frankenthaler thinned acrylic paint to the consistency of watercolor in order to create large, curving expanses of color through which the weave of the canvas remains visible. Like Jackson Pollock, she placed her canvas directly on the floor and poured paint from above, largely without the aid of a brush. Frankenthaler used color as her painterly language, but she never entirely abandoned representation. Although the references can be subtle, her paintings consistently evoke nature."

Miriam Schapiro, Jigsaw, 1969

"In paintings like Jigsaw, Miriam Schapiro explored how geometric abstraction could serve both formal and feminist concerns. Here, she experimented with the spatial effects of color....  [She] often adopted geometries that resembled apertures and passageways evocative of the female body. If a human figure is implied in this painting, however, it is hard to read as male or female – a rebuke of the idea that gender can be simply defined and categorized."

Richard Anuszkiewiez, The Fourth of the Three, 1963

Anuszkiewiecz "composed this painting with only three colors. But the visual impact – as the title implies – opens beyond that simple arithmetic. Although working with relatively straightforward combinations of line and color, he created complex visual effects, including optical illusions, movement, and the impression of colors mixing. Here, a simple shift in a line's width impacts the intensity of color and how depth and surface are read."

I like to visit the Whitney when I'm in New York because of its fine collection of modern American art, especially its Hoppers and Rothkos, as well as its location at the southern endpoint of the High Line linear park. The exhibition "Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s" ends in August 2019.