Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s

Robert Reed considered this painting a landscape. In it, a clearly defined rectangle of exposed canvas draws the viewer’s eye to the middle of the painting. Bold purple strokes of paint jostle at the rectangle’s sides. The work is part of Reed’s Plum Nellie series, which was exhibited in his solo show at the Whitney in 1973. In addition to referencing its color palette, the title recalls the Southern expression “plum nelly.” Reed remembered the phrase to mean “damn near,” suggesting that his relationship to abstraction is as much about the process of getting there as it is about arriving at a destination.