Frances Colpitt ("The Shape of Painting in the 1960s";
Art Journal, Spring 1991) states flatly that "the shaped canvas was the dominant form of abstract painting in the 1960s". She writes that the shaped canvas, "although frequently described as a hybrid of painting and sculpture, grew out of the issues of abstract painting and was evidence of the desire of painters to move into real space by rejecting behind-the-frame illusionism." .
Frank Stella,
Kenneth Noland,
Ellsworth Kelly,
Barnett Newman,
Charles Hinman,
Ronald Davis,
Edward Clark,
Richard Tuttle,
Leo Valledor,
Neil Williams,
John Levee,
David Novros,
Robert Mangold, Dean Fleming,
Gary Stephan, Paul Mogenson,
Clark Murray, and
Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s.
Geometric abstract artists,
minimalists, and
hard-edge painters may, for example, elect to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly
abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. There is a connection here with
post-painterly abstraction, which reacts against the
abstract expressionists' mysticism, hyper-subjectivity, and emphasis on making the act of painting itself dramatically visible – as well as their solemn acceptance of the flat rectangle as an almost ritual prerequisite for serious painting. While the shaped canvas first challenged the formalized rectangular shape of paintings, it soon questioned the constraints of two-dimensionality. According to
Donald Judd in his
Complete Writings: 'The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself: it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or in it". In 1964, the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum organized the definitive exhibition:
The Shaped Canvas curated by
Lawrence Alloway.
Lucy Lippard noted that this show focused exclusively on paintings with a "one-sided continuous surface" In 1965,
Frank Stella and
Henry Geldzahler confronted this definition of the shaped canvas by introducing three-dimensional shaped canvases by artists
Charles Hinman and
Will Insley in their seminal group show "Shape and Structure" at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. also experimented with shaped canvases in the late 1960s.
Pop artists such as
Tom Wesselmann,
Jim Dine, and
James Rosenquist also took up the shaped canvas medium. Robin Landa writes that "Wesselmann uses the shape of the container [by which Landa means the canvas] to express the organic quality of smoke" in his "smoker" paintings. According to Colpitt, however, the use of the shaped canvas by 1960s pop artists was considered at the time to be something other than shaped canvas painting properly speaking: "At the same time, not all reliefs qualified as shaped canvases, which, as an ideological pursuit in the sixties, tended to exclude Pop art." (op. cit., p. 52) == More recent shaped canvas art ==