One of the problems of abstract painting in general, as well as for American artists, in particular, was to find a way to successfully create a larger format. Cubist artists used forms that limited the size of their parts, since they could not be connected to each other in a uniform way over a wide area of canvas. The main way to solve this problem was Jackson Pollock.
Of the three main artists of the American color field (Helen Frankentaler, 1928-, Morris Louis, 1912–962 and Kenneth Noland, 1924-), Frankentaler was most closely associated with Jackson Pollock. Frankenthaler, often accompanied by renowned art historian Clement Greenberg, visited Pollock and his wife on their New York farm on several occasions.
Pollock's paintings, created by dripping and splashing paints on large canvases placed on the floor in his barn, were cubist in their limited color scheme, linear components and repetitive forms. However, its comprehensive structure, consisting of a flat, accented surface, was a major innovation that opened the door to extensive canvases, which in fact became the trademark of most modern art and, in particular, the artists of Color Field.
The enormous potential embodied in the Pollock approach did not escape the young Frankentaler. She had experience in all directions at the level, and not on easel canvases in the past, but after observing Pollock's methods, she adopted this approach almost exclusively.
Similarly, the use of Morlock Louis in the Pollock structure is particularly noticeable in the centralized, all-encompassing images of his early Floral series. In these works, joyful, colorful images are created through overlapping stripes that intersect each other in the center of the canvas and extend in the same way as the petals extending from the center of the flower.
Noland's circular paintings, including the refined Sun, are exemplary of his own structural approach, based on combining geometric shapes with optical color effects. In Sunshine, Noland placed the outermost circle (green bar) a few inches from the edge on a large (84 "x 84") canvas. The next circle of blue color to the center of the canvas is in close proximity to the green stripe.
The next concentric group, however, is golden orange yellow, separated equidistantly from both the outer bands and the innermost strip of pink. The circular image as a whole, of course, is equally distributed around all four sides of the canvas. Thus, Noland maintains the structural unity of the work, despite its considerable size.
Thus, the three most prominent painters with a color field used the Pollock approach, equally emphasizing every direction from which to view the canvas. It was a revolution for modern art and abstract painting in general.
