A Look Back on the History of the Washington Color School
Nearly 50 years after the peak of the Washington Color School movement, artist Kenneth Young finally got his moment. Young, an artist who wasn’t always a welcomed presence in the Color School movement, lived long enough to see one of his paintings in the National Gallery of Art. More recently, a posthumous show at the American University Museum at the Katzen celebrated Young’s legacy.
The fuzzy history of D.C.’s quintessential art movement can leave many artists, like Young, behind. Now, as curators across the city recount the long lasting impacts of the Washington Color School movement, they’ve made the distinct effort to include contributing artists from all backgrounds.
What was the Washington Color School?
The 1950s through the 1970s era of the Washington Color School movement in D.C. celebrated non-representational, abstract color field painting at a time when the nation was undergoing major changes, such as the Civil Rights Movement. The invention of acrylic paints gave way for new techniques of color application, such as staining and pouring paint onto a canvas. While some artists were criticized for the lack of concrete meaning at a pivotal moment in American history, the use of shape and color is meant to engage the viewer through the materials and technique instead of through a pictorial representation.
Six core artists, Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Thomas Downing, Paul Reed, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, are often associated with helping the Washington Color School become such a pivotal moment in the D.C. art scene. While the history of the Washington Color School remains fuzzy, the focus on process and materials leaves the question of who did and didn’t contribute to the movement open to interpretation.
A 2018 show at The George Washington University (GWU), Full Circle: Hue and Saturation of the Washington Color School, balanced the technical definition of the Color School with a celebration of artists from all backgrounds that the curators classified as part of the movement.
“I was concentrating not only on trying to include diverse artists who fit into this moniker of color field, but also I wanted to show the new materials in the world of paint that were experimental,” said Director, University Art Galleries and Chief Curator at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery Lenore Miller. “We were consciously trying to be more inclusive and introduce some artists who are not as famous but were still important to Washington for many reasons. It was more about the region’s importance.”
The Washington Color School is a distinctly D.C. movement that came to fruition at a time when the New York art scene was the place to beat. In a 1980s Washington Post article reflecting on D.C. arts, critic Benjamin Forgey raved about the Color School as “just about the only local phenomenon ever to become a piece of the Big Apple pie.”
Davis, one of the founding artists of the movement, credits the Color School’s success in New York as a sign of the times. “It was like a breath of fresh air in the early ’60s, because all this messy shit, you know, that was going on in New York — we provided an alternative,” he said in an oral history transcript obtained by the Archives of American Art.
Miller explained that the critical interest in artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland helped put the Washington Color School on the radar.
“New York was famous for many things, like abstract expressionism, surrealism, post-painterly abstraction, but Washington’s name was on the Color School,” Miller said.
The Art Story, a non-profit dedicated to spreading knowledge about modern art, credits “Washington Color Painters,” the 1965 exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art for possibly coining the name of the movement. Other shows around the time, like exhibits celebrating local artists at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, also helped popularize both the Color School and the founding artists within it.
The local and now defunct Jefferson Place Gallery also holds an important place in Washington Color School history. The gallery was a hub for D.C.-area contemporary artists from 1957 through 1974 that featured both icons and lesser known artists at the height of the Color School movement, such as Hilda Thorpe, V.V. Rankine and Sam Gilliam.
No Artist Left Behind
More recent shows, like Full Circle at GWU and Kenneth Victor Young: Continuum at the AU Museum, are making the intentional effort to focus on the variety of artists within the Washington Color School.
“We were clearly interested in showing women artists and not just the important male artists,” Miller said of the Full Circle exhibition. “Sam Gilliam is probably one of the best known people…Sam is kind of a second generation Washington Color School artist, but we also showed Alma Thomas in that exhibition and she’s extremely well-known right now.”
Best known for his work with unstretched canvas, Gillam is still known as the “foremost contemporary African American Color Field painter,” according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His experimentation with materials, such as the process of staining and saturating canvas, falls in line with traditional Washington Color School values and he received early recognition in a 1965 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art. And as of last year, he still has a studio in Petworth.
Alma Thomas became a painter after 38 years as an art teacher in D.C. public schools. She quickly rose to prominence within the Washington Color School Movement for her use of acrylics on large canvases inspired by the works of Davis, Noland and Louis, but Thomas’s work speaks for itself in its own right as abstract expressionism. Inspired by nature, her mastery of vibrant color earned national recognition despite a career hindered by arthritis pain.
As local galleries continue to celebrate and expand their definition of Color School artists, the history of the movement slowly comes into focus. Miller mentioned that places like the Dimock Gallery, another space operated by GWU, was an inclusive space for many artists in the Color School, but the full picture of the movement is still coming into view.
“There’s a lot of reasons to continue to explore the history of the Washington Color School because it’s not that straightforward,” Miller said. “In a way, Washington is way more diverse than the Washington Color School, but [the Washington art scene has] always been very diverse.”
Currently on view, the National Gallery of Art’s East Building and Smithsonian American Art Museum’s third floor of the east wing feature Washington Color School artists.
