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 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Taylor & Francis, Ltd., College Art Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 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 The Shape of Painting in the 1960s Frances Colpitt T he shaped canvas 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 Frank Stella'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. Donald Judd, 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- Ellsworth Kelly's White Plaque: Bridge Arch and Reflection cal pursuit in the sixties, tended to exclude Pop art. 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, Lawrence Alloway, lim- enjoy and find it more fruitful to think about many organiza- SPRING 1991 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 53 FIG. 1 Charles Hinman, Poltergeist, 1964, synthetic polymer paint on canvas over wood framework, 983/4 x 617/8 x 163/8 inches. Museum of Modern Art, 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. Robert Mangold'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 SPRING 1991 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 55 FI G. 5 Neil Williams, Polemic Dilemma, 1964, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 761/4 x 883/4 inches.