NOTE TO <SANITIZED>

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 06797575
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: March 9, 2023
• Document Release Date: January 29, 2021
• Case Number: F-2011-00399

Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797575
The draft you gave me E0A64g, B, and a) was focused on the
Washington School of Color. I worked on it cheerfully enough while I visualized
it referring to the old familiar exhibit of big, bland canvases. After I saw the
new exhibit, I was paralyzed: the draft doesn't match, can't be edited (it's like
visiting Rome with a Paris guidebook).
Yesterday I decided to go ahead and have fun with it, but even so, it won't
do. The final brochure needs:
1. To fit the exhibit.
2. A title (maybe just "the paintings in NHB")
3. An opening paragraph saying what exactly we are talking about.
The exhibit itself needs the usual little cards with the artist's name, the title of
the painting, the date, and maybe whether it is Melzac or Agency.
So here is my version of the useless brochure, for your eyes only . . . .
THE WASHINGTON SCHOOL OF COLOR
A carefree rendition
of a text that seems not to connect
with the current exhibit
[Many of?] the paintings that hang near the escalators in
the New Headquarters Building are from the collection of
modern art belonging to and
Melzac, longtime friends of the Agency) They represent
several2 American artistic styles of the years after World War
I This assumes that a the pictures in the exhibit are Melzac loans, though not
necessarily all Washington School of Color. This sentence is from original page
1. Original page 3 concludes with "The art [which art, exactly?] is either owned
by the Agency or lent by the Melzacs," which conflicts with the statement here
that all are Melzac.
2 I've put in "several" because I understand there is at least one Pollock. The
original says "represent a period in American art centered in Washington DC
between 1958 and 1962." Aside: It bothers me a little to dignify something that
lasted a mere four years (58-62) with the name of "school."
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Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797575
The three [or whatever] largest canvases, part of the
collection that formerly hung as a group in the corridor
along the OHB courtyard, represent a painting style centered in
Washington, D.C., between 1958 and 1962. It has since come to
be known as the Washington Color School.
This style is part of the post�World War II American
Modernism that found expression in large canvases filled with
color and non-representational shapes. Its lineage goes
farther back, however, to the 19th century, when painters,
especially in France, began to turn away from the style of
previous centuries.3 That shiftA away from literal
representation of landscapes, people, or religious or historical
scenes�came in response to the many changes that
accompanied the Industrial Revolution, including:
�A rising middle class. These people preferred familiar,
everyday scenes to the grand and heroic.
�New technologies. Painters at first viewed the
invention of photography as a threat; but gradually
some decided that it could relieve them of the
chore of recording people and events and began to
take on the role of explorers and researchers: what
ta art? how do color and shape affect the human
eye and heart?
�Advances in science. The science of optics spurred the
3 The above two sentences come from version B, substituted for the version C
ideas that I have attached at the end of this paper.
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artists to study the effects of the physical passage
of light across a surface. This examination of light
and color led American Modernists into many
experiments�more or less pleasing to the public
according to the artist's skill and taste, but all
inspired by a combined scientific and esthetic
impulse. After World War II, the development of
synthetic acrylic paints made it even easier to
work on a large scale and with brilliant color.
Another recent influence was the response of American
Modernists to Existentialism, born in Europe after World War ll
as a reaction against pre-war ideas, patterns, and standards.
Existentialism was the intellectual matrix of Abstract
Expressionism,4 evident in its frantic and often violent
gestures [patterns?] and its compressed space.5 (The artists of
the Washington School deliberately rejected that style; they
experimented instead with openness and clarity of design,
simplicity and strength of structure,6 and a lyrical7 attitude
toward color. They also developed a4slawarT�rn-efederterateal
technique of "staining" the canvas (rather than laying paint on
4 Does our exhibit contain any examples of Abstract Expressionism?
5 Does "compressed space" mean small canvasses, or busy patterns all over the
surface?
6 "Structures"? How are those different from design? Pattern? Shapes?
7 Oh dear, I sound like a philistine! What's "lyrical" in the graphic arts? Is it
soft, sensitive, subtle?
8 Deliberate. This means painstaking, harder work? Slower. I had the idea
(above) stuck in my mind that acrylic made things easier.
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Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797575
the surface with a brush).
"Staining" originated in the work of Jackson Pollock, one
of the best known abstract expressionists.9 In 1951 he first
used enamel on raw, unprimed canvas, creating a color that
penetrated the fabric instead of lying upon the surface.
Washigton painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis10 soon
adopted this technique, which satisfied their desire for
intensity of color.11 Acrylic colors also 4-es=w-e41---enarRell--
1Amn.c.LA-4eAAA-a
gave anistereasei color rftterm4y. They can be used safely on
an unprimed canvas, soaking into the raw cotton surface; the
viewer sees both the color and the basic fabric, giving a
transparency that, in the view of some critics, opens and
expands the picture plane.12
Someone cited a statement by the 18th-century English
philosopher Burke that "greatness of dimension is a powerful
cause of the sublime," and with this philosophical
encouragement, plus the ease of covering large areas with
9 Do we have a Jackson Pollock in our exhibit?
10 -
hy do we begin naming names? These gentlemen are strangers to me. Do we
have a Noland or a Louis in our exhibit? Were some of those old big canvases
done by these men?
11 I propose dropping the clause "which is naturally diminished by the priming
or underpainting needed in classical oil techniques." Is that true? Seems to me I
remember lots of intense color in regular oil paintings.
12 In this sentence I have dropped the phrase "conveying a sense of color as
somehow disembodied and more purely optical," because I do not understand it.
Does it mean that we see the texture of the cotton fabric as well as seeing the
color? Everything we see is optical. Did the writer mean plain sensory without
e
intellectual content? k
44,0_ -t-t�
�3,0,et-
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Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797575
enamel and acrylic color, the modernists13 began to make huge
canvasses flooded with large, simple areas of color, close in
value.14 Some critics interpreted these expansive creations as
being evocative of the vast American landscape.
In addition, the artists16 suppressed all the traditional
narrative and representational aspects of painting and
deliberately rejected the traditional effects of space
(perspective)�further emphasizing the flatness of the picture
plane.16
By this purging their canvases of all intellectual
content, leaving nothing but the strictly optical aspects of
painting (the color and shape), the artists strove for a pure
"art for art's sake." [This following is JR's invention] These
big, serene areas of color and shape are an artist's version of
the ideal behind the true scientist: a search for essential
truth without mental or emotional bias, a respect for the .
nature of the materials, a study of "seeing" as abstract as
mathematics.
13 Are we talking of 1) all modernists, 2) all since World War II (including
Pollock, et al), or more specifically 3) of the Washington School of Color�or
maybe 4) only of Noland and Louis (the most recently mentioned painters) . . . ?
14 Here I have dropped "that inundate the eye." I wonder if our agency engineers
know what "close in value" means? [without great contrasts of light and dark]
15 See question in footnote 13; which artists do we mean? [It seems here as if
we are talking exclusively of the big canvasses that used to hang together near the
courtyard. I get the impression that they are by Noland and Louis.]
1 6 I've omitted "the integrity of" [emphasizing the integrity of the flatness of
the picture plane]. You may want it back in.
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