Jill Nathanson

Sometime in the 1980s, the art critic Clement Greenberg walked into a forty-year-old painter’s exhibition in Soho. Right off, Greenberg said, “Hmm . . . this is serious painting.” Then he went on to say the work was lacking because, as he told the artist, “It doesn’t look like you’ve gone through Color Field.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, among many abstract painters and their supporters, adherence to Color Field painting was something like a religious belief. Color Field is a strain of abstract painting based in the strong formal and emotional impact of large areas of pure color, usually flowed onto, or “stained into,” the canvas by pouring instead of applying with a brush. Some artists included other things in the flood of material on canvas, too. Working on the unprimed canvas laid on the floor, rather than upright on the wall or an easel, was a rite as well as a defining method.

The style coalesced between the 1940s and the 1960s along a path of influence from Henri Matisse, with his independent shapes of lively pure color, to Joan Miró and his flowing abstract canvas fields; then to Jackson Pollock’s allover networks of flowing lines, Mark Rothko and the emotion of pure color, and Helen Frankenthaler, who emphasized the flow of the paint itself; and finally to Morris Louis, who, with his startlingly inventive mastery of all of the above, took it a step further. The breakthroughs in each artist’s mature work reverberated through the art world like an earthquake, renewing the way many looked at painting and how it could advance. 

Louis’s oeuvre was considered the most complete statement of Color Field painting. Frankenthaler’s oeuvre came to have a more lasting presence, owing largely to Louis’s early death at forty-nine in 1962 and Frankenthaler’s long life. Her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea is usually considered the first full-fledged Color Field painting and perhaps marks the style’s invention. But in the late 1950s and the 1960s, Morris Louis was the hero, and he remained huge for many years. Many artists’ careers evolved owing to the artistic influence of these two. That entire sequence—Matisse, Miró, Pollock, Rothko, Frankenthaler, and Louis, plus the related work of Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann—provided fresh insights into painting and a new vocabulary and syntax of form (and not only for Color Field). It fed a creative pool of serious art and ideas for decades. One of the earliest young Color Field artists to develop his own lasting style inspired by these artists is Ronnie Landfield, whom I wrote about in Dispatch.

Clement Greenberg’s unrelentingly high opinion of this lineage, first Pollock, then Frankenthaler, and ultimately Louis, and its subsequent influence on key art dealers, curators, and collectors, was largely responsible for its worldly success. For Greenberg, two of the most important characteristics of these artists’ work were the flow of the paint and the sense of flow in the painting as a whole. That “flow” is a kind of creative and conceptual energy that may be said to be the sine qua non of this style of painting.

Color Field painting has retained a varying vitality for over sixty years and, in the hands of certain artists, thrives today. By now, owing to its longevity and identifying qualities, it perhaps can be considered a genre of its own. But for the artists pursuing it, it is hardly that—it is the center of art, based on the belief that abstraction underlies all art and that Color Field painting, as a result, is an abstract art both refined and fundamental.

Among the several longstanding and accomplished adherents of the style practicing today are Francine Tint, about whom I have written in Dispatch before, and Jill Nathanson, whose current exhibition at Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea is the occasion for these observations. The great difference in personality between Nathanson’s and Tint’s bodies of work hints at the potency still left in Color Field painting.

One feature distinguishing Nathanson’s work from typical Color Field art is the importance of composition. The flow of material is no longer the main event; the arrangement of shapes and edges and lines is. In this way, Nathanson partly brings back the less fluid, interlocking forms of pre–Ab Ex abstraction (before artists “escaped from Cubism,” as Greenberg put it). And yet the flow of the veils of paint is also insistent and inescapable. The unfettered emotional and formal freedom in Tint’s work feels more akin to Abstract Expressionism, whereas the peaceful, studied refinement of Nathanson’s work is more like its Color Field sources. Yet both styles come from the same wellspring. Sometimes it seems as if the two artists are aware of each other’s works and are riffing off them, like dueling jazz soloists trading fours and eights. Indeed, Nathanson’s titles often bring music to mind, as in Talk Tango (2023) and ReHarmonic (2024), and the exhibition’s title, Chord Field, unites music and painting.

Viewing Nathanson’s paintings is immersive: while you are looking at the composition—distinctly an experience of the painting’s surface—the interaction of the colors and veils pulls you in. Her many horizontal paintings correspond to the visual field of the eyes, illusionistically drawing you deep into the painting spaces. Two paintings in the show are vertical, including Green Shift (2024): these keep the viewer’s attention on the composition’s surface, less allowing you to swim around in the work’s depth and more encouraging you to move as if amid the overlapping flats of a stage set.

Some of the paintings conjure more drama out of the visual experience of the color field than you might expect. The appearance of object-like shapes in Fluid Bridge (2021) and in Stretch Radiant (2023–24) is unusual for Color Field works. A similar phenomenon occurs in Near Distance (2022), whose title may refer to the space opened up between the “object” on the right and the “scene” behind it. The illusion of perceived space in these paintings can become overwhelming and welcome the viewer to get lost in them, as in Changing Pitch (2022). Some paintings’ titles refer to the physical experience brought to mind by the color interaction, such as Evening’s Garment (2022).