The Shape of Painting in the 1960s Author(s): Frances Colpitt Source: Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Constructed Painting (Spring, 1991), pp. 52-56 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777086 Accessed: 19-12-2016 18:06 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.112.225.81 on Mon, 19 Dec 2016 18:06:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Shape of Painting in the 1960s

Frances Colpitt

T he was the dominant form of abstract ited his selections to work having a "one-sided 'continuous painting in the 1960s. That optimistic, space-age surface,'"6 omitting artists such as Hinman (fig. 1). Also decade was especially appropriate for the charac- noting the exclusion of tondos and diamonds, the reviewer Jill teristic forms, enumerated by Lucy Lippard, of "parallelo- Johnson outlined the alternatives for the shaped canvas: grams, diamonds, rhomboids, trapezoids, triangles- Lukin's work was associated with assemblage, which pre- suggesting speed [and] streamlined stylization."l Leo Val- sents shape as an additive construct, while for Williams and 52 ledor's paintings, for example, conjured up "the profile of one Stella the shape of the canvas was "a logical extension of the of the more outlandish supersonic transport designs with painted shapes."7 high, backbending tailfins"; and 's, "the Although surely influenced by recent developments in strikingly angled wings and tails of jet aircraft."2 Artists painting, artists who made shaped canvases in the 1960s associated with the cooperative Park Place Gallery, where were also inspired by Medieval and Renaissance art, and many experimented with radically shaped canvases, pro- architecture. In 1963 Italian wall paintings and mosaics moted the concept of "space warp," a fluidly dynamic notion made a profound impression on David Novros, who, in re- of pictorial space. Charles Hinman, a baseball player for the sponse, developed his concept of "painting-in-place." His Milwaukee Braves in the 1950s, had claimed, "I look for first shaped canvases, composed of large angular units, buoyancy and try to defy gravity."3 created a kind of painted architecture and proposed "a way The shaped canvas, although frequently described as a for the painter to reclaim some of the control that has been hybrid of painting and sculpture, grew out of the issues of lost: a control over architectural context, a control over the abstract painting and was evidence of the desire of painters to spiritual context."8 By 1967 multiple right angles had re- move into real space by rejecting behind-the-frame illusion- placed the diagonal emphasis in Novros's work, so that the ism. About the only thing that distinguished the finished architectural reference (doorway; post and lintel) is more work from sculpture, in an era when polychrome sculpture explicit (fig. 2). The painter Paul Mogensen, who traveled in proliferated, was the attachment of the shaped canvas to the Europe with Novros in 1963, has noted the precedence of wall. Critics frequently speculated on just how far an artist nonrectangular Sienese altarpieces for the shaped canvas.9 could deviate from the flat rectangle before actually making Although never exhibited, Mogensen's first shaped paintings sculpture. , for example, saw the shaped canvas were made in 1965. Better known are his multipanel paint- as an intermediate step in the development from painting ings, consisting of monochromatic rectangular units, the toward three-dimensional, floorbound objecthood.4 Between sizes and placement of which are determined by mathemati- painting and sculpture stood what Dore Ashton described as cal progressions. "the stretched canvas relief."5 At the same time, not all A remarkable prototype of the shaped canvas is reliefs qualified as shaped canvases, which, as an ideologi- 's White Plaque: Bridge Arch and Reflection cal pursuit in the sixties, tended to exclude . In (1952-55, private collection, London). The two joined semi- contemporary criticism, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wessel- circles of White Plaque were derived from the arch of a bridge man were infrequently grouped with the abstract painters. in Paris and its reflection in the Seine. Similarly, the monu- An exception was Richard Smith, whose shaped abstractions mental curves of Stella's Protractor paintings were inspired of cigarette packages were the result of his association with by, among other things, Islamic gateways, and have been British Pop art in the fifties. compared to High Gothic vaulting.10 His work is architec- The definitive exhibition "The Shaped Canvas," at the tonic, the artist explained, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1964, included work by Smith, Paul Feeley, Sven Lukin, Neil .. .in the sense of building-of making buildings ... I Williams, and Stella. The curator, , lim- enjoy and find it more fruitful to think about many organiza-

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FIG. 1 Charles Hinman, Poltergeist, 1964, synthetic polymer paint on canvas over wood framework, 983/4 x 617/8 x 163/8 inches. , New York, Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund.

FIG. 2 David Novros, Untitled, 1967, acrylic lacquer on Dacron, 112 x 156 inches. Destroyed.

ART JOURNAL

This content downloaded from 128.112.225.81 on Mon, 19 Dec 2016 18:06:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms tional or spatial concepts in architectural terms, because when you think about them strictly in design terms, they becomeflat and very boring problems.l

Lukin and Will Insley were, in fact, architecture students before becoming painters in the sixties. Insley's gridded Wall Fragments, which follow his "secret" shaped paintings of 1961-63, suggest geometric pinwheels or a highway clo- verleaf, and allude to city planning. 's first shaped works, the Masonite Walls of 1964-65, are also architectural abstractions, inspired by the silhouettes of New York buildings. In the Area series, Mangold reintroduced the curve, which had characterized his earliest exhibited paint- ings, and which Joseph Masheck later compared to the omni- present arch form of the Renaissance and Romanesque periods. 12 Another account of the development of the shaped canvas, locating its derivation in previous painting, might position Barnett Newman at its point of origin. He has been 54 FFIG. 3 Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961, relief construction of welded steel, wire, and canvas, 80V4 x 89 x 343/4 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kay called the "'father' of the shaped canvas," because of his tall, Sage Tanguy Fund. narrow, strip paintings of 1950.13 Of consequence also were Jasper Johns's Flag paintings. These were widely acknowl- edged for what was called "the coincidence of image and shape," in which the shape of the canvas appears to be determined by the image (and the picture thus seems to have a shape, as opposed to being a rectangular container). For Donald Judd, "The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rec- tangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it."14 In Lee Bontecou's work, on the other hand, "there is no field in which the structure or image occurs; there is no supporting context. The entire shape, the struc- ture and the image are coextensive."15 Bontecou's bulbous canvas reliefs, punctured by dark crevices and holes, were first made in 1959. Distinct from the ascetic designs of most shaped canvases in the sixties, her work is aggressively erotic as well as formally innovative (fig. 3). Bontecou made reliefs, according to Judd, but "Stella was the first to use a canvas that wasn't rectangular. Lukin was next."16 In Stella's designs for what would become the Aluminum paintings of 1960, the right-angle "jogs" of the vertical stripes resulted in "leftover" spaces or boxes at the center, corners, or edges. To make a unified field of modular stripes, the artist cut out the inconsistent spaces (fig. 4). 17

FIG. 4 Frank Stella, Avicenna, 1960, aluminum paint on canvas, 74/2 x 72 Stella's shaped canvases inspired Michael Fried's controver- inches. Menil Collection, Houston. sial theory of deductive structure, which held that not only were the stripes coincident with the shape of the canvas, they were deduced from it-"generated by the framing edge." As Stella's work become more radically shaped, so did Fried's analysis of it. In response to the irregular contours of the 1966 paintings-amalgams of rectangles, triangles, and parallelograms-he claimed that "the pictures in question are not shaped: if being shaped implies having an enclosing

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FI G. 5 Neil Williams, Polemic Dilemma, 1964, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 761/4 x 883/4 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Benjamin, 64.39.

shape."'8 This it seems, is a first step in salvaging Stella's New York in 1963. Neil Williams was an early and important work forpainting, as opposed to sculpture, an effort to which practitioner of the genre. Like Stella, he allowed the edges of Stella himself remains committed. 19 his image, a pattern of repeated parallelograms, to determine The hexagonal perimeters of Larry Bell's shaped can- the painting's shape, which was appropriately zigzagged or vases, also begun in 1960, outline a cube drawn in perspec- sawtoothed (fig. 5). Ellen Johnson reported that "the idea for tive. In the center a smaller cube is inscribed in reverse. his first shaped canvas [in 1963] came to him while reading These were intended as "illustrations of volumes,"20 realized an essay by Heisenberg on philosophical problems in atomic three-dimensionally in his freestanding, coated-glass physics."21 Williams's works became progressively complex, cubes. Also illusionistic are Ron Davis's 1964 shaped can- with overlapping and transparent geometrical forms deter- vases, patterned with jazzy, optical designs. The more sub- mining their dynamic shapes. dued diamond-shaped paintings on Fiberglas were based on Especially novel in the sixties were paintings that were perspectival renditions of a square platform seen from above. not flat. The "protruding" shaped canvas, according to Eliz- The complex contours of his 1968-69 Dodecagons are par- abeth Baker, was the result of "the painter's aggressive ticularly disorienting. invasion of a space which, until recently, was not considered Many shaped canvases mingled elements of Op art's his to invade." The first such work she saw "was one of Sven illusionism and formalist painting's actuality. Larry Poons Lukin's, in 1962," although the artist claims to have made showed a set of dot paintings with triangular canvas wedges one in 1960.22 "When I started shaping the canvas- projecting at right angles to the wall at the Green Gallery buildingin it out from the wall into 2-dimensional forms-I

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6. Lucy R. Lippard, "New York Letter," Art International 9 (March 1965): 46. 7. J[ill] J[ohnson], "Reviews and Previews," Artnews 63 (February 1965): 57. 8. Unpublished interview with David Novros, New York, 1980. 9. Conversation with Paul Mogensen, Los Angeles, 1990. The gable and cruciform shapes of altarpieces, and their architectural references, are often cited as forerun- FIG. 6 Sven Lukin, Dove, 1965-66, oil on canvas, 593/4 x 48 x 141/4 inches. ners to the shaped canvas in the sixties. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from the 10. William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 129- Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund, 66.58. 34. 11. In ibid., 46. 12. Joseph Masheck, "A Humanist Geometry," Artforum 12 (March 1974): 40. 13. Rubin, Frank Stella, 54. See also Walter Hopps, United States of America: said hah-hah! At last I'm alone. But then the whole shaped Eighth Sao Paulo Biennial (Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Art Museum, 1965), n.p. thing started," Lukin said in 1969.23 Eventually, his forms 14. Judd, Complete Writings, 181-82. 15. Ibid., 65. spilled forward like ribbons rolling off the canvas plane on the 16. Ibid., 161. Nowhere does Judd discuss the relationship between Bontecous work, wall (fig. 6). Described by Lippard as "'topological' shaped which he clearly considers reliefs, and Stella's flat paintings, also described as reliefs or sculptural canvas[es]," Charles Hinman's paintings are in Complete Writings, 57. 17. See the accounts in Barbara Rose, A New Aesthetic (Washington, D.C.: Washing- also exceedingly complex in design and construction.24 His ton Gallery of Modern Art, 1967), 18, n. 6; and in Rubin, Frank Stella, 47-50. geometric canvases of 1964 convey the illusion of solids at 18. Michael Fried, "Shape as Form: Frank Stella's New Paintings," Artforum 5 (November 1966): 18-23. angles to one another, often involving extreme distortion. 19. See the discussion of Stella's controversial position in William Rubin, Frank Other paintings consist of sensuously swelling shapes, "as Stella: 1970-1987 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 15-20. 20. Melinda Wortz, Larry Bell: New Work (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, though he had married a birchbark canoe to an Irish harp."25 1980), 11. In 1965 Judd was able to assert that "several people are 21. Ellen H. Johnson, "Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists," Artnews 64 (Summer already stretching canvas into three-dimensional forms, 1965): 44. Lippard suggested that these may have, in fact, influenced Stella's work; see Lippard, "Perverse Perspectives," 30. and, while the possibilities are not used up, it is no longer 22. Elizabeth C. Baker, "Solid Anti-Geometry," Artnews 65 (March 1966): 57, 74. very unusual to do so."26 Although most artists returned to 23. James R. Mellow, "New York Letter," Art International 13 (January 1969): 57. 24. Lippard, "Perverse Perspectives," 29. the rectangle or developed a more truly sculptural idiom in 25. L[awrence] C[ampbell], "Reviews and Previews," Artnews 64 (February 1966): the 1970s, younger painters are once again pursuing the 16. 26. Judd, Complete Writings, 158. The list of artists making shaped paintings in the evocative possibilities of the shaped canvas and testing the sixties should also include Robert Barry, Stephen Durkee, Michael Heizer, Peter limits of the rectangle. _ Hutchinson, Patricia Johanson, Craig Kauffman, Sol LeWitt, Clark Murray, Joe Overstreet, Edwin Ruda, Sylvia Stone, Peter Tangen, Richard Tuttle, and Lawrence Notes Weiner. An exhibition titled "Shaped Canvas," at the Van Bovenkamp Gallery in New 1. Lucy R. Lippard, "Perverse Perspectives," Art International 11 (March 1967): 29. York in 1965, included Peter Pinchbeck, James Massey, Frank Lincoln Viner, Marc 2. David Bourdon, "E = MC2 a Go Go," Artnews 64 (January 1966): 58; idem, Morrel, and Valledor, and was reviewed by Lippard; see her "New York Letter" in Art untitled essay in American Abstract Painting: 1960-69 (Long Island City, N.Y.: P.S. International 9 (September 1965): 59. 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1983), n.p. 3. Quoted in Lloyd Goodrich, Young America 1965 (New York: Praeger and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1965), n.p. FRANCES COLPITT is assistant professor of art history and 4. Donald Judd, Complete Writings, 1959-1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia criticism at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author College of Art and Design, 1975), 158, 161. of Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (UMI Research 5. Dore Ashton, "New York Commentary," Studio International 171 (April 1966): 167. Press, 1990).

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