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About the Washington Color School
By Jean Lawlor Cohen
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Untitled, 1959, 55" x 55" inches, © The Estate of Vincent Melzac, courtesy Conner Contemporary Art, Inc.')>
Sonata, 1980, Lithograph, 21 28 1/2 inches')>
Untitled-III, 1978, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 70 in')>
Topeka XVII, 1967 (acrylic on unprimed canvas)')>
Color Line, 1961, Magna on canvas. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966')>
Point of Tranquility, (1959-1960), Magna on canvas., Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966')>
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On June 25, 1965, an exhibition called "Washington Color Painters" opened at the Washington
Gallery of Modern Art near Dupont Circle. It featured six artists who had been or were still
active in the capital. A work by Morris Louis, dead of cancer three years before, hung beside
works by fellow abstractionists Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Tom Downing, Kenneth Noland and
Paul Reed. Although lumped together by curators and critics ever since, the six were never a
group, and their friendships were either erratic or non-existent. Some of them met in passing
at the Washington Workshop, a lively studio-salon atop a Gilded Age mansion, now the Embassy of
Indonesia. They all knew Jacob Kainen and Leon Berkowitz there, artists who provided instruction
for others while the six, at various times, hung out. Later friendships formed between pairs:
Noland and Louis for a while, Downing and Mehring both Noland's students at Catholic University,
and Reed and Davis who knew each other from youth.
Grudgingly the living five accepted the Color School label, knowing that tags provided some
handle for the work and some accessibility for the wordsmiths. What actually bound them were a
love of bold color, more often than not squeezed directly from the tube, and a fascination with
flat, raw canvas. At various times they stained unprimed cotton duck with velvety washes of
color or marked it with the hard edges of geometric forms like chevrons, stripes and circles.
They had all begun as Abstract Expressionists, rejecting the easel for architectural scale,
putting faith in intuition and spontaneity. Yet they yearned for a way out of expressionism¹s
overheated emotion and self-conscious gesture. Forty years after that historic DC exhibition,
their paintings reveal not just a shared passion for color but highly individualistic visions.
They represent a moment when Washington heeded Willem de Kooning's call for "hallelujah painting."
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