Historically speaking, color has traditionally embodied a fairly codified set of associative symbols. For example, red has almost inevitably been related to fire, blood, and danger. Black has been indicative of death, emptiness and mourning. White has been the indisputable sign of purity. The use of color in contemporary works has often rejected these traditional meanings. Instead, color can be imbued with personal and unconventional meanings.

The freedom from color-induced expectations has been eagerly explored by abstract painters. As Marcia Tucker has observed succinctly in her article “The Structure of Color,” an essay included in Gregory Battcock’s anthology The New Art, “[t]he possibilities of response to abstract works…are more varied, since we are not bound by the color ‘expectations’ we had in looking at figurative works; there is no area that should consist of a particular hue.” The inherent power and strength of color can therefore be revealed in the viewer’s emotional response to the color itself.

For Helen Frankenthaler (1928- ), Morris Louis (1912-1962) and Kenneth Noland (1924- ), color became both form and subject. In Frankenthaler’s abstract “landscapes", including works as diverse as The Human Edge and Mountains and Sea, the locales aren’t specific, but the colors and shapes reflect the rhythm and essential qualities of nature.

In The Human Edge, the deep blue at the lower edge is an obvious reference to water. The thin, dark shape just above the blue horizontal is immediately reminiscent of a seashore or landmass. The large open space above the “land” is atmospheric. At the top of the painting, perhaps where clouds might be expected, Frankenthaler has painted three irregular, hard-edged rectangles in gray, orange and pink.

The combination of colors and shapes is intriguing when considered with the evocative title. Is the edge of the seashore/landmass the “human edge” or are the oddly inverted rectangles in the “sky” the “human edge” in contrast with the more naturalistic edge created by the blue and brown horizontals?

In contrast with the definitive shapes and colors that Frankenthaler utilized in The Human Edge, her well-acclaimed Mountains and Sea employs a very different approach. This work was painted after Frankenthaler had visited Nova Scotia. Not only has she utilized aquatic blues and greens as noted earlier, but elements of nature are also mimicked in the technique of spilling and splashing and in the results of that technique.

There are “splashes” of color throughout the work and a sense of the organic process of water pooling and evaporating. The rhythm of constant movement encountered at the ocean’s edge is also reflected in the shapes piled up in the center of the painting. These fleeting shapes appear ready to crash down onto the “sand” at any moment.

As these two paintings demonstrate, the languages of color and shape are more intrinsically related to each other and to natural themes in Frankenthaler’s works than in the more dissonant schemes of Fauvistic paintings. In fact, even in Frankenthaler’s most abstract works, her shapes are fundamentally related to the colors themselves. Thus, the combinations of colors and shapes in Frankenthaler’s works operate on multiple levels. Not only are they perceptual, but the color-shape elements are also capable of functioning on the realistic and emotional levels as well.

Although Frankenthaler sometimes used bold and exaggerated shapes and colors in works such as Tutti Frutti, she did not wish to emulate the artificiality which she also found in Fauvist works. Even the tightly arranged shapes in Tutti Frutti do not entirely fill the canvas. Although the canvas shows through only in half a dozen places, these areas give sufficient “breathing room” to the composition.

Frankenthaler’s influence on Morris Louis was not confined to the contribution of her seminal staining technique, but also involved a transfer of her indebtedness to Fauvism. In addition to developing his own exceptional version of Frankenthaler’s painting method, Louis further sought to exaggerate the Fauve aspects he found in Frankenthaler.

In contrast with the relatively pale colors of Frankenthaler’s early Mountains and Sea, Louis worked with intense hues from the start. Although these are subdued by the multiple layering in works such as Blue Veil, Louis’s success with paintings consisting of swathes of intense colors is seen in the vast majority of his mature works, including the beautifully vivid While Series II.

In this large piece, 8’ x 11’11”, Louis has created a masterful effect with his combinations of color and shape. The bands of partially overlapping color are thinner at the bottom edge and expand in a leaf-like manner towards the top of the painting. The result is not only the distinct impression of organic shapes, but a sense of movement as well.

The color-shapes are like fronds waving in the ocean. The visibility of golden yellows in between the darker shapes of brown, green, blue, orange and violet gives the viewer the feeling that the painting is illuminated from behind. Although some of the colors themselves are as vivid as those that appear in Fauvism, the combination of colors and shapes creates a more naturalistic outcome.

In other works by Morris Louis, especially in the Unfurleds and Stripes, color becomes virtually the entire subject. In paintings like Unfolding Light, the chromatic relationships are the sole focus. In contrast with the almost exclusively audacious colors of Fauvism, Louis’s canvases also include black and earth tones—ochres, umbers, muted purples and olive greens—intermixed with the prismatic hues.

In Unfolding Light (1961), Louis begins with intense bands of red, yellow, and green on the left edge of the series of stripes. As the stripes proceed further to the right, he utilizes additional reds, yellows and greens that have been dulled and muted. The intensity then picks up again with another stripe of vivid red and then green, followed by a space in which the canvas is left blank. Then Louis adds three more dulled stripes of brown, orange and blue, followed by a final yellow that begins with a golden tone near the top of the painting and emerges at the bottom with a bright, sunshine yellow.

In Unfolding Light, as well as in his paintings in general, Louis has allowed the canvas itself to play a major role. Like Frankenthaler, he has thus avoided the denseness of many Fauvist paintings. One of the additional major challenges that Louis faces is to maintain pictorial unity across the wide expanse of canvas. He accomplishes this primarily through his use of color. Like the Fauvists, Louis achieves a pictorial logic based on internal relationships.

The work of Kenneth Noland utilizes a different approach to composition that nevertheless shares the Fauvist energetic celebration of life and color. For Noland, color placement is akin to musical composition. Noland believes that each color possesses a pitch that resonates and affects other, adjacent colors, which in turn affect the overall composition. Colors can also be used in conjunction with each other like major and minor chords and repeated in varying ways to create visual counterpoint. The musical analogies include harmony, dissonance, tone and dynamics.

Noland’s outstanding painting entitled Song (1958) is the most obvious example of his attempt to translate musical sounds into color harmonies. The central pink circle, surrounded by a ring of red, then a concentric band of black, then red again, then deep blue and then a final band of gray with a hazy, irregular edge, is like a single brass note vibrating outwardly until the sound begins to disintegrate and fade.

The horn is blaring and the message of Fauvism is carried forward clearly: life, pleasure and color are to be acclaimed boldly and without apology. In Noland’s Song, color has found a voice and the internal harmonies are exquisitely tight and strong.