Shaped Canvas - Postwar Modern Art and The Shaped Canvas

Postwar Modern Art and The Shaped Canvas

Frances Colpitt ("The Shape of Painting in the 1960s"; Art Journal, Spring 1991) states flatly that "the shaped canvas was the dominant form of abstract painting in the 1960s". She writes that the shaped canvas, "although frequently described as a hybrid of painting and sculpture, grew out of the issues of abstract painting and was evidence of the desire of painters to move into real space by rejecting behind-the-frame illusionism." .

Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Charles Hinman, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Ronald Davis, Richard Tuttle, Leo Valledor, Neil Williams, John Levee, David Novros, Robert Mangold, Gary Stephan, Paul Mogenson, Clark Murray, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Geometric abstract artists, minimalists, and hard-edge painters may, for example, elect to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. There is a connection here with post-painterly abstraction, which reacts against the abstract expressionists' mysticism, hyper-subjectivity, and emphasis on making the act of painting itself dramatically visible - as well as their solemn acceptance of the flat rectangle as an almost ritual prerequisite for serious painting.

The apertured, superimposed, multiple canvases of Jane Frank in the 1960s and 1970s are a special case: while generally flat and rectangular, they are rendered sculptural by the presence of large, irregularly shaped holes in the forward canvas or canvases, through which one or more additional painted canvases can be seen. A student of Hans Hofmann, and sharing his concern for pictorial depth as well as his reverence for nature, she also favors colors, textures, and shapes that are complex, nuanced, and organic or earthen - giving her work a brooding or introspective quality that further sets it apart from that of many other shaped-canvas painters.

In the late 1960s, Trevor Bell, a leading member of the British St. Ives group introduced dynamic shaped-canvas paintings that combined radical, angular structures with an abstract expressionist sensibility. These works continued to evolve into the 1970s as Bell's works were exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and The Tate Gallery in London. The artist’s highly chromatic, color field surfaces on massive canvases merged shaped painting and the subsequent blank space surrounding the object into a state of equal importance. The Italian artist Luigi Malice also experimented with shaped canvases in the late 1960s.

Pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann, Jim Dine, and James Rosenquist also took up the shaped canvas medium. Robin Landa writes that "Wesselmann uses the shape of the container to express the organic quality of smoke" in his "smoker" paintings. According to Colpitt, however, the use of the shaped canvas by 1960s pop artists was considered at the time to be something other than shaped canvas painting properly speaking: "At the same time, not all reliefs qualified as shaped canvases, which, as an ideological pursuit in the sixties, tended to exclude Pop art." (op. cit., p. 52)