When the stain became the image

To feel why this picture was a break, set it against what came right before it. Abstract Expressionism (the bold, large-scale American abstraction that dominated New York painting after the Second World War) had two great modes, and both kept paint on top of the surface, and both put the painter’s body and touch front and center. Willem de Kooning worked in loaded, slashing brushstrokes, paint heaped up thick (impasto, paint piled so high it stands in ridges), dragged and scraped, every gesture of the hand left visible. Jackson Pollock poured liquid enamel, but it dried as a raised skein, a tangle of line lying on top of the cloth like dried glue. In both, paint was a worked, three-dimensional, surface event, and the canvas underneath was a support to be covered.

Mountains and Sea makes the stain itself the image. Because the thinned color soaks into raw, unprimed cloth and fuses with it, there is essentially no raised paint, no impasto, no visible brush “handwriting.” Color and ground stop being two things and become one flat optical plane; the eye looks through the wash to the fabric; whole areas of bare canvas are left active rather than “unfinished.” The picture flattens out, and the painterly drama, the loaded stroke, the heroic gesture, drains away. Attention shifts from the act of painting to the thing itself: color, and field. This is the door into what gets called Color Field painting: abstraction built from large, open areas (fields) of flat, soaked color, with the artist’s touch all but invisible.

Here is the hinge, and it is one decisive move. Frankenthaler took Pollock’s breakthrough, paint poured rather than brushed, and pushed it a single step past him: from pour-on-surface to pour-as-stain-into-surface. Pollock’s enamel sat on the cloth; her thinned oil sinks into it. That one decision, the pour that becomes a stain, is what opened the path from Pollock’s action painting (the canvas as a record of the body in motion) to Color Field (the canvas as a soaked plane of pure color). It is not the first abstract painting, not the first poured painting, not the first to leave canvas bare. It is the first soak-stain, and the bridge it built. The painter who would put that most memorably was on his way to her studio.