CIA Reading Room 06797576: THE WASHINGTON COLOR SCHOOL- -OF WHICH THE PAITNINGS FROM THE MELZAC COLLECTION ARE EXPONENTS IS PART OF POST-WORLD WAR II AMERICAN MODERNISM

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..J�J, CJ ...NJ � 111.� � V I � �������� alb Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797576 The Washington Color School--of which the paintings from the Helzac collection are exponents--is part of post-World War II American Modernism that found expression in large canvases filled with color and non-representational shapes. In even broader terms, however, its lineage goes back at least to the mid- and second half of 19th century Europe, especially France, when a number of factors served to set art in a direction radically different from the representational, objectified art of past centuries. Among these factors were: --the industrial revolution, creating a middle class that not only 'changed the nature of art patronage (from the court and the church to the urban dweller, often in mercantile or civil service professions), but also the very subject matter of art (away from grand historical, mythological, or religious narratives to a depiction of specific, even mundane moments in contemporary time and place, as seen in the Impressionists); --scientific and technological developments, as in the science of optics--which examined the passage of light and its impact on the human eye, and photography�which, while it initially appeared to be a threat to painting, in time came to be seen as a liberating force, freeing the artist from the traditional role of recorder to one of explorer; --philosophy, reaching back as far as Aristotle, for whom color was "flawed light, a tragic necessity between divine radiance and stygian darkness," on to the late 19th century mystical and occult movements, with their attendant claims of colors as symbols, examining the myth and art of past--including non-European--cultures; Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797576 10D,C10,7O Approved for Release: 2021/01/29 C06797576 --and finally the development of Freudian and Jungian phychology, which, in its conscious examination of the dream world state and production of new, biomorphic images, was a major factor in the development of Surrealism. It is important to recall that the notion of painting being affected by factors apparently extraneous to itself is nothing new in the tradition of western art: the Dutch oil paintings of the 17th century, for example, Intended, generally for domestic use and developed under the watchful eye of an ever-powerful mercantile class that espoused the tenets of the Reformation, are in stark contrast to the elaborate and emotional frescoes In Italian churches of the same time period that promoted the cause of the Counter-Reformation. This was art with an agenda! 004 In examining the works of the Washington Color School, then, it is important to view them relative to their milieu, especially to the work of the related New York-based Abstract Expressionists, the "gesture" or "action" painters, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning. The Intellectual matrix of both groups is the philosophy of Existentialism, developed partly as a reaction against th