HARD EDGE

Hard-Edge

Hard-Edge Painting reinforces the idea of the canvas or paper as a field of abstract forms. Similar to the interrelationship of colorful forms that we find in Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, this abstract movement also emphasizes the flatness of the surface (either canvas or paper). But that's it! Hard-Edge Painting shows us clean-edged, monochromatic areas of color that defy AbEx and Color Field's freewheeling ambiguity in favor of a detached clarity of vision. Cooler yet still spiritual, it can track its influences way back to Synthetic Cubism, Park Avenue Cubism, De Stijl, Suprematism and the Bauhaus.

The British critic Lawrence Alloway wrote: "The whole picture becomes a unit; forms extend the length of the painting or are restricted to two or three tones. The result of this sparseness is that the spatial effect of figures on a field is avoided." This response to space may relate to the contemporaneous obsession with exploring outerspace, ignited by the success of the Soviet Sputnik Program of the late 1950s.

California critic Jules Langsner (1911-1967) invented the term "Hard-Edge" for his exhibition Four Abstract Classicist at the San Francisco Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum in 1959. Lawrence Alloway introduced the term to a wider audience in his title West Coast Hard-Edge, a 1960 revision of the show created for the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Queens College in Belfast.

What are the Key Characteristics of Hard-Edge Painting?

-Clean lines

-Colorful geometric areas

-Flat surface

-The canvas/paper/print as a unit, a shape on the wall