Revisiting the Joy of Pattern and Decoration
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, New York — Some works of art are conducive to concise summary. A painting by Morris Louis can be described as an abstraction filled with space of the kind Clement Greenberg called “purely optical.” Though Greenberg never gave that sort of purity a persuasive definition, his succinct accounts of work by Louis and other color field painters ushered them into their lofty places in the modernist canon. Those who tended that canon prized his concision as much as the notion that readily definable developments could be arranged in simple, seemingly inevitable sequences. Neatness counted and nothing was neater, more