Dec

Hard-edge painting

Hard-Edge Painting, the term applied to abstract paintings composed of simple geometric or organic forms executed in broad, flat colors and delineated by precise, sharp edges. Hard-edge painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on an overall flat surface; precise, razor-sharp contours; and broad areas of bright, unmodulated colour that have been stained into unprimed canvas.

Hard-Edge Painting shows us clean-edged, monochromatic areas of color that defy AbEx and Color Field's freewheeling ambiguity in favor of a detached clarity of vision. Hard-edge painting is a tendency in late 1950s and 1960s art that are closely related to Post-painterly abstraction and color field painting.

Term applied to abstract paintings composed of simple geometric or organic forms executed in broad, flat colours and delineated by precise, sharp edges. The term Hard-edge painting was coined in 1959 by art historian Jules Langsner to characterize the nonfigurative work of four artists from California in an exhibition called Four Abstract Classicists (Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art... The term then gained broader currency after British critic Lawrence Alloway used it to describe contemporary American geometric abstract painting featuring an “economy of form,” “fullness of color,” “neatness of surface,” and the non relational, allover arrangement of forms on the canvas. Geometric abstraction can be used to describe works with large numbers of separate, possibly modeled, elements creating a spatial effect; hard-edge painting refers only to works comprised of a small number of large, flat forms, generally avoiding the use of pictorial depth. In contrast to gestural "action-painters", Hard-edge painters went to great efforts to de-personalize their compositions, in order to prioritize formal elements (line, shape, color), and downplay less important elements such as spirituality or emotionalism. Hard-edge abstraction was part of a general tendency to move away from the expressive qualities of gestural abstraction.

Although the term 'hard-edge' is helpful in describing the tendencies of the late 1960s, it had barely been launched before artists were also moving in new directions, and it fell from use as abstract painting explored new problems in the 1970s. The last Hard-Edge show - featuring works by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Helen Lundeberg, and John McLaughlin - was held in 2005, at the Ben Maltz Gallery of the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.