"The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility." 

-Clement Greenberg (Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 1971)

Over the last decade or two, contemporary art has been the vehicle of irony, political protest, neo-figuration often ideas preselected by the marketplace as the “mode de jour”. Whilst art has often been “political” and rightly so, we have also forgotten that it can also be beautiful. Beauty became to be a word shied away from, an idea that invoked triviality or lacking in substance and as a result some of the most important American painting of the 20th Century is yet to be fully acknowledged or recognized for the groundbreaking ideas it encompassed—yes, “Greenbergian Colour Field” incorporated totally radical ideas of space and colour, no less than the now idolized “Minimalism” of which Colour Field is a “kissing cousin. And yes, it is beautiful too—Noland, Olitski, Frankenthaler, Motherwell, Bush, Poons, Caro, and Murray each made a major contribution to this “radical idea” of colour and space—it is now time to celebrate, time to enjoy—time to contemplate—the sheer beauty of Colour Field.   ~Miriam Shiell Toronto 2021