POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

This movement was coined in 1964 by the critic, Clement Greenberg for a exhibition. Artists are; Al Held, Ellsword Kelly, Frank Stella and Jack Youngerman. It grow out from Abstract Expressionism in late 1950s and early 1960s and in some ways reacted against it. In general, the new abstract artists shunned to overt emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism and rejected the expressicve gestural brushstrokes and tactile surfaces. For Greenberg, the most vocal champion of Post-Painterly Abstraction the history of modern art from Cubism through Abstract Expressionism to Post-Painterly Abstraction was one of purist reduction. He believed that each art form should restrict itself to those qualities essential only to itself to visual or optical experiances, and avoid any associations with sculpture, architecture, theatre, music or literature. Works of this that stressed their formal qualities, exploiting the purely optical qualities of pigment, emphasizing the shape of the canvas and the flatness of the picture plane. represented for Greenberg the superior art form of the 1960s.
Morris Louis, Where






 Shaped Canvas, Frank Stella 1967






Ellsworth Kelly, The Meschers, 1951



*Dempsey Amy, Art in the Modern Era, Harry N. Abrams Inc.,2002