Shaped canvas
Encyclopedia
Tondo (art)
A tondo is a Renaissance term for a circular work of art, either a painting or a sculpture. The word derives from the Italian rotondo, "round." The term is usually not used in English for small round paintings, but only those over about 60 cm in diameter, thus excluding many round portrait...
, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
, as well as some other Renaissance painters, sometimes chose this format for madonna
Madonna (art)
Images of the Madonna and the Madonna and Child or Virgin and Child are pictorial or sculptured representations of Mary, Mother of Jesus, either alone, or more frequently, with the infant Jesus. These images are central icons of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity where Mary remains...
paintings. Alternatively, canvases may be altered by losing their flatness and assuming a three dimensional surface. Or, they can do both. That is, they can assume shapes other than rectangles, and also have surface features that are three dimensional. Arguably, changing the surface configuration of the painting transforms it into a sculpture. But shaped canvases are generally considered paintings.
Apart from any aesthetic considerations, there are technical matters, having to do with the very nature of canvas as a material, that tend to support the flat rectangle as the norm for paintings on canvas. (See Departing from the rectangular below.)
In the literature of art history and criticism, the term shaped canvas is particularly associated with certain works created mostly in New York after about 1960, during a period when a great variety and quantity of such works were produced. According to the commentary at a Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
exhibition site, "... the first significant art historical attention paid to shaped canvases occurred in the 1960s...."
Pioneers of modern shaped-canvas painting
Abraham Joel Tobias made "shaped canvases" in the 1930s. Uruguayan artist Rhod Rothfuss began to experience with "marco irregular" paintings in 1942, late in 1944 publish in Arturo magazine your seminal text "El marco: un problema de la plástica actual" Munich-born painter Rupprecht Geiger exhibited "shaped canvases" in 1948 in Paris, France.Paintings exhibited by the New Orleans born abstract painter Edward Clark
Edward Clark (artist)
Edward Clark also known as Ed Clark is an African American abstract expressionist painter and one of the early experimenters with shaped canvas in the 1950s.Edward Clark stated:-Biography:...
shown at New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
's Brata Gallery in 1957 have also been termed shaped canvas paintings.
Between the late 1950s through the mid 1960s Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
experimented with shaped and compartmentalized canvases, notably with his 'American Flag 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...
' - one canvas placed on top of another, larger canvas. Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
's experimental assemblages
Assemblage (art)
Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects...
and "combines" of the 1950s also explored variations of divided and shaped canvas. Argentine artist Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera.-Early life:...
also began early on the experiment in shaped and compartmentalized canvases with his Concetto Spaziale, Attese series in 1959. Assigning a date to the origin of the postwar shaped canvas painting may not be possible, but certainly it had emerged by the late 1950s.
Postwar modern art and the shaped canvas
Frances Colpitt ("The Shape of Painting in the 1960s"; Art JournalArt Journal (CAA)
Art Journal, established in New York in 1941, is a publication of the College Art Association of America . As a peer-reviewed, professionally moderated scholarly journal, its concentrations include:...
, Spring 1991) states flatly that "the shaped canvas was the dominant form of abstract painting in the 1960s". She writes that the shaped canvas, "although frequently described as a hybrid of painting and sculpture, grew out of the issues of abstract painting and was evidence of the desire of painters to move into real space by rejecting behind-the-frame illusionism." .
Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
, Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
, Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...
, Richard Tuttle
Richard Tuttle
Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line.- Biography :...
, Leo Valledor
Leo Valledor
Leo Valledor was a Filipino-American painter who pioneered the Hard-edge painting style. During the 1960s he was a member of the Park Place Gallery in Soho, New York, which exhibited many influential and significant artists of the period. He exhibited in several prominent galleries and museums,...
, Neil Williams
Neil Williams (artist)
Neil Williams was an American painter. Williams was an abstract painter primarily known for his pioneering work with shaped canvases in the early 1960s. His paintings of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are associated with geometric abstraction, hard-edge painting, color field, and lyrical abstraction,...
, John Levee
John Levee
John Levee is an American abstract expressionist painter who has worked in Paris since 1949. His father was M. C. Levee.-Background:...
, David Novros, Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold is an American minimalist artist.- Works :“Robert Mangold’s paintings,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in 1997, “are more complicated to describe than they seem, which is partly what’s good about them: the way they invite intense scrutiny, which, in the nature of good...
, Gary Stephan, Paul Mogenson, Clark Murray
Clark Murray
Clark Murray is an American sculptor who is best known for his large outdoor constructions of welded and painted steel pipes.Sculptures by Clark Murray include:...
, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Geometric abstract art
Geometric abstract art
Geometric abstraction is a form of abstract art based on the use of geometric forms sometimes, though not always, placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective compositions...
ists, minimalists
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
, and hard-edge painters may, for example, elect to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. There is a connection here with post-painterly abstraction
Post-painterly Abstraction
Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto....
, which reacts against the abstract expressionists' mysticism, hyper-subjectivity, and emphasis on making the act of painting itself dramatically visible - as well as their solemn acceptance of the flat rectangle as an almost ritual prerequisite for serious painting.
The apertured, superimposed, multiple canvases of Jane Frank
Jane Frank
Jane Schenthal Frank was an American artist. She studied with Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg and is known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, and textile artist...
in the 1960s and 1970s are a special case: while generally flat and rectangular, they are rendered sculptural by the presence of large, irregularly shaped holes in the forward canvas or canvases, through which one or more additional painted canvases can be seen. A student of Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, and sharing his concern for pictorial depth as well as his reverence for nature, she also favors colors, textures, and shapes that are complex, nuanced, and organic or earthen - giving her work a brooding or introspective quality that further sets it apart from that of many other shaped-canvas painters.
In the late 1960s, Trevor Bell, a leading member of the British St. Ives group introduced dynamic shaped-canvas paintings that combined radical, angular structures with an abstract expressionist sensibility. These works continued to evolve into the 1970s as Bell's works were exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...
in Washington, DC and The Tate
Tate
-Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...
Gallery in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. The artist’s highly chromatic, 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...
surfaces on massive canvases merged shaped painting and the subsequent blank space surrounding the object into a state of equal importance. The Italian artist Luigi Malice
Luigi Malice
Luigi Malice is an Italian abstract artist.Malice studied at Naples Academy of Fine Arts as a pupil of Emilio Notte, later studying under avant-guard and Informal Art painter Domenico Spinosa ....
also experimented with shaped canvases in the late 1960s.
Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
ists such as Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann was an American artist associated with the Pop art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture.-Early years:...
, Jim Dine
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...
, and James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...
also took up the shaped canvas medium. Robin Landa writes that "Wesselmann uses the shape of the container [by which Landa means the canvas] to express the organic quality of smoke" in his "smoker" paintings. According to Colpitt, however, the use of the shaped canvas by 1960s pop artists was considered at the time to be something other than shaped canvas painting properly speaking: "At the same time, not all reliefs qualified as shaped canvases, which, as an ideological pursuit in the sixties, tended to exclude Pop art." (op. cit., p. 52)
More recent shaped canvas art
Among shaped-canvas artists of more recent generations, Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) produced playfully "exploding" canvases, in which exuberance of shape and color seems to force itself outside the normative rectangle - or, as a 1981 New York Times review put it: "...the inner shapes blast off from their moorings and cause the whole painting to fly apart."Singapore's Anthony Poon
Anthony Poon
Anthony Poon was one of the pioneer abstract artists in Singapore best known for his "Wave" series of paintings which he began working on since 1976.-Biography:...
(1945–2006) continued the tradition of cool, abstract, minimalist geometry associated with the shaped canvas in the 1960s. The analytical poise and undulating repetitions in his work somewhat recall the work of modular constructivist sculptors such as Erwin Hauer
Erwin Hauer
Erwin Hauer is an Austrian-born American sculptor who studied first at Vienna's Academy of Applied Arts and later under Josef Albers at Yale. Hauer was an early proponent of Modular Constructivism and an associate of Norman Carlberg...
and Norman Carlberg
Norman Carlberg
Norman Carlberg is an American sculptor and printmaker. He is noted as an exemplar of the modular constructivist style....
.
The globetrotting Filipina artist Pacita Abad
Pacita Abad
Pacita Abad was born in Basco, Batanes, a small island in the northernmost part of the Philippines, between Luzon and Taiwan. Her more than 32-year painting career began when she travelled to the United States to undertake graduate studies. She had over 40 solo exhibitions at museums and...
(1946–2004) stuffed and stitched her painted canvases for a three-dimensional effect, combining this technique (which she called trapunto, after a kind of quilt
Quilt
A quilt is a type of bed cover, traditionally composed of three layers of fiber: a woven cloth top, a layer of batting or wadding and a woven back, combined using the technique of quilting. “Quilting” refers to the technique of joining at least two fabric layers by stitches or ties...
ing technique) with free-wheeling mixed media
Mixed media
Mixed media, in visual art, refers to an artwork in the making of which more than one medium has been employed.There is an important distinction between "mixed-media" artworks and "multimedia art". Mixed media tends to refer to a work of visual art that combines various traditionally distinct...
effects, riotous color, and abstract patterning suggestive of festive homemade textiles, or of party trappings such as streamers, balloons, or confetti. The total effect is joyously extrovert and warm - quite opposed to both the minimalist and pop art versions of "cool".
In reference to the shaped paintings of Jack Reilly (born 1950), Robin Landa emphasizes the power of the shaped canvas to create a sensation of movement: "Many contemporary artists feel that the arena of painting can be greatly extended by the use of shaped canvases. Movement is established in the container (canvas) itself as well as in the internal space of the container." A 1981 review in Artweek stated "These intricately constructed pieces are related to wall sculpture, bridging the gap between painting and sculpture, they have an illusionary sculptural presence." An additional function of the shaped canvas in Reilly's earlier work was to emphasize the ambiguity of pictorial space in abstract art
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
.
Departing from the rectangular
When thinking about shaped canvas it might be helpful to bear in mind that canvases are normally rectangular. Canvas is a woven material, with threads, called the warpWarp (weaving)
In weaving cloth, the warp is the set of lengthwise yarns that are held in tension on a frame or loom. The yarn that is inserted over-and-under the warp threads is called the weft, woof, or filler. Each individual warp thread in a fabric is called a warp end or end. Warp means "that which is thrown...
and weft
Weft
In weaving, weft or woof is the yarn which is drawn through the warp yarns to create cloth. In North America, it is sometimes referred to as the "fill" or the "filling yarn"....
, lying at right angles to each other. In order to achieve equal tension on all the threads comprised by this fabric, stretcher bar
Stretcher bar
A stretcher bar is used to construct a wooden stretcher frame used by artists to mount their canvases. They are traditionally a wooden framework support on which an artist fastens a piece of canvas...
s, usually of wood, form a frame that mimics the layout of the threads of the fabric. There is therefore an inherent reason for paintings to be flat and rectangular – although artists have often departed from the norm, especially in circumstances requiring special commissions, an example being the paintings Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
created for Albert C. Barnes
Albert C. Barnes
Albert Coombs Barnes was an American chemist and art collector. With the fortune made from the development of the antiseptic, anti-blindness drug Argyrol, he founded the Barnes Foundation, an educational institution based on his private collection of art...
and for Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...
.
Dust tends to gather on the surfaces of any three-dimensional object. Keeping a complicated shaped canvas painting clean can require care and attention that can be avoided by sticking to flat-surfaced paintings.
In certain instances shaped canvas paintings can be seen as painting in relationship to sculpture and to wall relief. During the early to mid 1960s many young painters born in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s made the transition from painting flat rectangles to painting shaped canvases; some of those artists decided to make sculpture and some artists like Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, and Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
did both. Other materials can be used in place of canvas. More viable materials might obviate some of the drawbacks of shaped canvas.
External links
- JSTOR online copy of Frances Colpitt article, "The Shape of Painting in the 1960s". [full access subscribers only]
- Corcoran Gallery of Art: discussion, with color image, of Richard Tuttle's octagonal painting, "Red Canvas" (1967)