The Shape of Color: Excursions in Color Field Art, 1950-2005 Book

Color field art covers more acreage than you might expect. In this major reappraisal cataloguing an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the definition is extended to include both contemporaneous works in media other than painting and recent iterations by younger artists. Thus, artists more often deemed Minimalist, such as Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Fred Sandback, and Robert Irwin, are seen as responding to ambitions expressed in color field painting, and contemporary works, such as those by Peter Halley and Polly Apfelbaum, resonate from proximity to masterworks from an earlier generation. Apfelbaum's Gun Club from 2002, for example, dances meaningfully with Helen Frankenthaler's Tutti Fruitti, 1966. In addition, you'll see how Morris Louis, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Milton Avery, and Frank Stella can play on the same field with Odili Donald Odita, Christian Eckert, and Charles Long with Stereolab. Curator David Moos and other leading scholars in the field, Sarah K. Rich and Robert Hobbs among them, add insightful commentary.