The Color Field Paintings That Anticipated the Visual Simplicity of “Warming Stripes”
Ed Hawkins’s classic visualization is reminiscent of an abstract painting style that emerged in the 1950s and ’60s in which color and simplicity is everything
Welcome to Earth Week on Nightingale! In honor of Earth Day on April 22, we are publishing Earth-related data visualization content all week. Dataviz can enhance our appreciation of the planet, illuminate our relationship to it, and call us to action to preserve it. After all, we only have one and it means the world to us. You can keep up with all of our Earth Week articles here.
In his 2018 “Warming Stripes” visualization, climate scientist Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading distilled climate change data into bars of color from blue to red, each representing a year between 1850 and now. With no title, axes, or text descriptions, it breaks many data visualization rules in communicating the trend of warming temperatures over time. Using only color and shape to convey meaning, its shift from cool blue on the left to fiery red on the right offers a readily understandable visual of complex data. That striking, accessible presentation of scientific information has made it hugely popular as an image of the urgency of climate change, appearing on magazine covers, climate strike banners, a tram in Germany, a vase, and as the backdrop of a music festival.
The reduction of an idea to its basic form in “Warming Stripes” is reminiscent of the Color Field style of abstract painting that emerged in the 1950s and ’60s, with hubs in New York City and Washington, DC. Building off postwar Abstract Expressionism, the Color Field painters stepped away from the gestural movement in work by artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, where the process of painting was very much visible. A Color Field painting pulls the viewer in through its simplified lines and shapes, the focus on the interplay of the colors themselves rather than the hand of the artist.
As with “Warming Stripes,” all except the essential elements are eliminated in Color Field paintings. In 2018, Brian Kahn in Gizmodo recognized that Hawkins’s approach recalled Color Field artists like Barnett Newman who stated in his 1948 text “The Sublime Is Now” that the “image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.” In other words, these were not paintings that needed an academic comprehension of art, much as grasping the significance of “Warming Stripes” does not require a deep knowledge of science.
Like most art styles, the independent practitioners of Color Field painting were united through the words of a critic, with Clement Greenberg in his 1955 “American-Type Painting” essay describing the flat expanses of color in Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Newman’s monumental paintings as “fields”: “Broken by relatively few incidents of drawing or design, their surfaces exhale color with an enveloping effect that is enhanced by size itself.”
Some color field artists, like Newman, used dramatic lines that cut through large planes of color; others like Kenneth Noland employed geometric shapes, such as the target in his 1962 “Drought” now at the Tate in London. In its concentric circles of blue and yellow — the paint blurring at the edges — is a sense of motion on a static canvas. Hawkins has also identified the power of the target shape, with his animated spiral graph of the changes in global temperature over time preceding “Warming Stripes” and even appearing in the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Like Hawkins’s unconventional approach to data visualization with “Warming Stripes,” the Color Field painters broke many of the accepted rules of art. They did not prime their canvases; some, like Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and Morris Louis did not use brushes, and instead stained their canvases with liquid paint. The Washington, DC-based Gene Davis had no formal training in art, having worked as a sportswriter and White House correspondent until he began making his hard-edged stripe paintings in his 40s. He considered how a “color interval” could create a visual rhythm like music, and the lines of vibrant colors contrasting on the canvas pull the viewer’s gaze in all directions: “I’m like the jazz musician who can’t read music but plays by ear,” Davis once said. “I paint by eye.”
The idea of refining something to its essence still resonates, whether in art or any visual design.
The Color Field artists believed that color alone could express moods, experiences, and ideas, which above all were about making and seeing something new through the simplest of forms and figurations. British artist Robyn Denny, for instance, was interested in how the movement of a viewer could complete the perspective of a painting, such as the 1960 “Baby is Three,” now at the Tate, which has lines with blocks of blue, red, and green, varying in width across the long canvas, so that the viewer has to physically move their head to take in their scale. Newman likewise was engaged in bringing the viewer in close for an encounter with the sublime, saying of his colossal “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with its field of red intersected with lines of subtle shades: “It’s no different, really, from meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically. Also, there’s a metaphysical thing, and if a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives.”
In her New York studio, Frankenthaler placed her canvases on the floor, similar to what she’d seen Pollock do with his “action paintings.” But rather than throwing tangles of paint from above like Pollock, she pioneered the stain technique, with one of the earliest examples being her 1952 “Mountains and Sea.” Thinning the oil paint, letting it pool on a raw canvas where it soaked into its fibers, she created diaphanous flows of color. Her work was incredibly influential to Louis and Noland, who visited her studio in 1953.
Color Field painting was overshadowed by Pop Art and Minimalism in the 1970s, although it’s had a recent revival in critical attention, such as with the 2008 Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975 exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. The idea of refining something to its essence still resonates, whether in art or any visual design.
Through this approach, “Warming Lines” has brought dialogue on climate change into public space, where anyone can creatively share its simple presentation of a serious issue. Like the Color Field painters who were communicating with an audience already engaged in postwar abstract painting, Hawkins recognized that a visualization that is immediately understandable and backed by scientific data would resonate in today’s world of social media and collaborative sharing. Through the ShowYourStripes.info site launched in 2019 by climate change group Climate Central and Hawkins, anyone can get a “Warming Stripes” visualization for their local region. This access has even brought “Warming Stripes” into museum settings, becoming art in its own right, such as an installation last year on the roof of the German Maritime Museum, in Bremerhaven, Germany, and a public art project organized by the Anchorage Museum this year. Everywhere it appears, it has a clear message in its radiant lines: Climate change is real and is a crisis.
