Hard-Edged Painters

(noun)

Painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. This style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color-Field painting.

Related Terms

Examples of Hard-Edged Painters in the following topics:

  • Post-Painterly Abstraction

    • Examples of Post-Painterly Abstractionists include Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly-ruled shapes and edges, and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis , who explored the tactile and optical aspects of large, open fields of pure color.
    • While the term Post-Painterly Abstraction gained some currency in the 1960s, it was gradually supplanted by Minimalism, Hard-Edge Painting, Lyrical Abstraction and Color-Field Painting.
    • Compare and contrast the techniques of the Hard-Edged Painters and the Color-Field Painters.

  • European Postwar Expressionism

    • Unlike American Expressionism, which was more abstract, many European painters maintained the primacy of the figure in their work.
    • Bacon and Freud were British painters who often painted expressive portraits noted for their psychological penetration.
    • Giacometti was a Swiss painter and sculptor mostly known for his sculptures of isolated, attenuated figures.
    • Important Tachisme painters include Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Nicholas de Stael, Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff , Georges Mathieu and Jean Messagier.
    • Art Informel, a movement closely related to Tachisme, rejected the geometric, hard-edge style of American abstraction in favor of a more intuitive form of expression.

  • Jackson Pollock and Action Painting

    • The term action painting was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 in his essay "The American Action Painters", signalling a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters and critics.
    • Action painting refers to the spontaneous activity that was the "action" of the painter, through arm and wrist movement, painterly gestures, leading to paint that was thrown, splashed, stained, splattered, poured, and dripped .
    • I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor.
    • I need the resistance of a hard surface.
    • In 1948 he married American painter Lee Krasner, and they moved to what is now known as the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio in the Springs area of East Hampton, Long Island, NY.

  • The New York School

    • The New York School was an informal group of American abstract painters and other artists active in the 1950s and 1960s.
    • The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s and 1960s in New York City.
    • The canvas as the arena became a credo of Action painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the Color Field painters.
    • Painters, sculptors, and printmakers created art that was termed Action painting, Fluxus, Color Field painting, Hard-edge painting, Pop art, Minimal Art and Lyrical Abstraction, among other styles and movements associated with abstract expressionism.

  • Painting in the High Renaissance

    • Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael are considered High Renaissance painters.
    • While the term has become controversial, with some scholars arguing that it oversimplifies artistic developments and historical context, it is hard to ignore the works of these High Renaissance artists as they remain so iconic even into the 21st century.
    • Stylistically, painters during this period were influenced by classical art, and their works were harmonious.

  • Painting

    • During the 1950s and 1960s, forms of Geometric expression including Hard-edge painting and Frank Stella's work in Geometric abstraction emerged as reaction against the subjectivism of Abstract expressionism.
    • Color field painting, Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction emerged as radical new directions.
    • Associated with painters such as Frank Stella, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement and depending on the context can be construed as a precursor to the postmodern movement.
    • The Painter Prince (original title: Der-Malerfürst) is an example of a highly concentrated artwork in respect of the symbols that appear in a multi-dimensional space.

  • Aquatint

    • Once the desired tonality is achieved, the artist applies a hard ground to stop out further exposure to the acid.
    • The method was developed by painter and printmaker Jan van de Velde in Amsterdam, around 1650, and introduced to England in the 1770s.

  • Pop Art

    • Two important painters in the establishment of America's Pop Art vocabulary were the American Neo-Dadaists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
    • Selecting the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented mass culture while simultaneously creating parodies of it in a soft manner.

  • Types of Content

    • A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.
    • However, without some knowledge of the story being told it is very hard to read ancient pictures because they are not organized in a systematic way like words on a page, but rather can unfold in many different directions at once.

  • Impact of the Protestant Reformation

    • This is the direct influence of one major criticism of the Catholic Church during the Reformation—that painters created biblical scenes that strayed from their true story, were hard to identify, and were embellished with painterly effects instead of focusing on the theological message.