Glory of the World

A New Look at Mid-Twentieth Century Colour Field Painting

This book casts new light on mid-twentieth-century Colour Field painting from the perspective of the artists' ambitions for the future of abstract painting. Colour Field became a convenient, albeit imperfect term to describe paintings in which vast areas of colour appear as the dominant force.

Colour Field was not an art movement; rather, it was a cohort of like-minded artists. While the American Abstract Expressionists cleared a path for this postwar generation to forge ahead with abstract painting, their achievements also challenged artists such as Frank Bowling, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Frank Stella, and Alma Thomas, to create abstraction anew. Experimenting with non-traditional painting mediums and methods, as well as these artists' probing of the conventions of painting, led to unprecedented works.

The book's title, Glory of the World, takes its cue from the writings of Frank Stella on the influential artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, whose glorious and exalted abstract paintings, produced solely through the straightforward manipulation of pigment, set a high bar for this generation's aspirations.