Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s @ the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

Morris Louis (1912-1962), Gamma Delta, 1959-60. Magna on canvas, 103 1/8 × 152 1/2 in. (261.9 × 387.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Glen Alden Foundation and the McCrory Foundation, Inc. 69.57. © 2018 Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Richard Anuszkiewicz, The Fourth of the Three, 1963. Acrylic on composition board, 48 1/16 × 48 1/16 in. (122.1 × 122.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 64.4. © 2019 Richard Anuszkiewicz/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Installation view of Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 29-August 2019). From left to right: Morris Louis, Gamma Delta, 1959-60; Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962; Miriam Schapiro, Jigsaw, 1969; Alvin Loving, Septehedron 34, 1970; Bob Thompson, Triumph of Bacchus, 1964; Helen Frankenthaler, Orange Mood, 1966. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962. Alkyd on canvas, 85 9/16 × 85 9/16 in. (217.3 × 217.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 63.34. © 2019 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Frank Bowling, Dan Johnson's Surprise, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 115 15/16 × 104 1/8 in. (294.5 × 264.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 70.14. © 2019 Frank Bowling/Licensing by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Alvin Loving (1935-2005), Septehedron 34, 1970. Acrylic on shaped canvas, 88 5/8 × 102 1/2 in. (225.1 × 260.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of William Zierler, Inc. in honor of John I. H. Baur 74.65. Courtesy the Estate of Al Loving and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Emma Amos (b. 1938), Baby, 1966. Oil on canvas, 46 1/2 × 51 in. (118.1 × 129.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased jointly by the Whitney Museum of American Art, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, museum purchase with funds provided by Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee T.2018.33a-b. © Emma Amos; courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. Many artists during this era adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Color Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvas, dramatizing materiality and visual force of painting. At the same historical moment, an emerging generation of artists of color and women explored color’s capacity to ignite new questions about perception, specifically its relation to race, gender, and the coding of space. Spilling Over looks to the divergent ways color can be equally a formal problem and a political statement.

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s is on view through August 18 at the Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

The Power & Vitality Of The Image: Read Our Interview Of Controversial Artist Darja Bajagic →

Where the political left was once the clear bastion of free speech and expression in the U.S., it could be argued that the new left silences thought and speech perceived as antithetical or offensive to its values almost as much as the right wing does, or did. This is a problem for culture, and evidently, for art. “Political correctness,” says Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, “is a desperate attempt by the public norms to tell you what is decent, what is not.” What Žižek suggests here is that political correctness can be harmful in its ability to obscure the truth and dilute public discourse; by sanitizing rhetoric we sanitize cultural meaning. This climate of over-the-top, politically correct theatrics has infiltrated the art world; art’s job is ultimately to push back on societal taboos and interrogate prevailing norms. Good art is almost always offensive to someone. Click here to read more