with Action painting, one of two major strains of the 20th-century art movement known as Abstract Expressionism. The term typically describes large-scale canvases dominated by flat expanses of colour and having a minimum of surface detail. This strain was identified in the mid-1950s by the American art critic Clement Greenberg, who used the term “post-painterly abstraction” to describe the work of a group of painters including Morris Louis (Louis, Morris), Helen Frankenthaler (Frankenthaler, Helen), and Kenneth Noland (Noland, Kenneth).

The notion of colour-field painting implied that only optical responses were significant in painting. Subject matter was forbidden and illusionism condemned. Frankenthaler (Frankenthaler, Helen)'s stained paintings perfectly embodied Greenberg's formalist direction by making surface and colour inseparable. She literally soaked the unprimed canvas with pigment, creating fields of amorphous colour. Inspired by Frankenthaler's stained paintings, Morris Louis (Louis, Morris) began soaking his canvases in the late 1950s. He also eliminated the brushstroke altogether by pouring viscous lines of multicoloured paint to create rainbow effects. Like Jasper Johns (Johns, Jasper) before him, Noland used the banal target as a found design with which to examine different hues and values of flat colour.