Post-painterly Abstraction

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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.

Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting which derived from the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. The approximately 100 artists in the exhibit included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Friedl Dzubas, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella and a number of other American and Canadian artists who were becoming well-known in the 1960s.

As painting continued to move in different directions, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "Post-painterly Abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by "Minimalism", "Hard-edge painting", "Lyrical Abstraction" and "Color Field Painting".