Hard-edge painting

Hard Edge ( German "Hard edge " ) is a form and style of painting in the fine arts, which by the American art critic Jules Langsner got its name from 1958. Langsner used the term in connection with an event organized by him in the summer of 1959 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum used in order to characterize the special non-figurative ( abstract ) representation. The title of the exhibition was: Four Abstract Classicists. The four artists exhibiting were: Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley and Karl Benjamin. Due to the great success the exhibition was shown in 1960 in London. There, the English art critic Lawrence Alloway coined the term West Coast Hard Edge. In order for the connection to artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland was made ​​.

Hard Edge thus describes a painting that is not representing and serving no visible at first glance the theory of composition. It is often a stereotyped, two-dimensional, geometric Malform with hard edges. It is (apparently) controlled unemotionally and rationally, the artist deliberately left no individual brush marks on the image surface, the colors are rather cold. As a rule, hard-edge images have hardly more than two or three different colors.

Generally Hard Edge as a " counter-movement " Abstract Expressionism, in which playing the pictures of the experience situation of the artist. The Colour Field Painting Hard Edge has in common the large color fields. However, in contrast to the smooth transitions at the Colour Field Painting the swatches are hard and sharply demarcated from each other at the Hard Edge clarify the scope of the term of this form of painting as Hard Edge.

An extreme escalation learned the hard-edge painting by Frank Stella, who further developed this mystical and contemplative direction of abstract expressionism in the mid- 1960s through its versatile shaped canvases to shaped canvas painting.

Among the representatives of this direction in America include Josef Albers, Robyn Denny, Al Held, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Miriam Schapiro, Leon Polk Smith and Frank Stella. As a representative in Germany are Georg Karl Pfahler and in the years 1964-1978 Günther C. Kirchberger.