Color Field painting is a 1950s american abstract movement using vast flat areas of saturated colour to produce contemplative immersive experience.
Color Field painting emerged in the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s as a strand of Abstract Expressionism distinct from the gestural energy of Pollock and de Kooning. Its principal figures — Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still — composed paintings of large flat areas of saturated colour intended to envelop the viewer in a sustained perceptual and emotional experience. Rothko's hovering rectangular forms in 'Orange and Yellow' (1956) and the Rothko Chapel in Houston (1971) are among the most celebrated examples. Newman's 'Onement I' (1948), with its single vertical 'zip' down a field of red-brown, became his signature gesture. A second generation — Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam — adopted the staining technique of pouring thinned acrylic paint directly onto unprimed canvas, allowing colour to soak rather than sit on the surface. The critic Clement Greenberg championed Color Field as the next step in painting's reduction to its essential properties. The movement remains a defining strand of post-war American abstraction.