Introduction

David Breslin: Hi, my name is David Breslin. I'm the DeMartini family curator and director of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This exhibition gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that used color as the animating factor. I think one could say that, for all painting, color is something that's instrumental, but for these paintings, it's really determinative of how we see them, how we are affected by them, how I think the artist really wanted to put forward color as opposed to gesture or line or representative subject matter to really get across what he, she, they were wanting to do with this painting.

I've always loved paintings from this period because of the way that they really call the viewer, really compel the viewer into the space that the paintings make. 

And what some of those artists were really thinking about was less about what was in the painting in terms of subject matter, but really how those painting made a viewer feel, how they set the stage for a certain environment in which the viewer and their feelings, their perception, their politics, really began to share the same stage as the painting in the room.