Colourist painting is characterised by the use of intense colour, which becomes the dominant feature of the resultant work of art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, more important than its other qualities. This tendency in painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 was foreshadowed by French Impressionism

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

 in the late 19th century, and came to prominence in the work of the Fauvists in the early 20th century. It has since surfaced in a variety of individual styles and art movements, outside France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 as well, the most prominent being the Scottish Colourists

Scottish Colourists

The Scottish Colourists were a group of painters from Scotland whose work was not very highly regarded when it was first exhibited in the 1920s and 1930s, but which in the late 20th Century came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art....

, the Polish

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 Colourists (a.k.a. Kapists

Kapists

Kapists or KPists , also known as the Colourists, were a group of Polish painters of 1930s who dominated the Polish artistic landscape of the epoch...

), or the American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 abstract Color Field

Color Field

Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...

painters.