Howard Mehring

Howard Mehring (1931-1978) was one of the most important members of the Washington Color School, the influential group of Color Field painters who transformed the American art landscape in the late 1950s and 1960s. A student of Kenneth Noland, who was one of the best-known contemporary American Color Field painters, Mehring shared a studio from 1956 to 1958 with his fellow Washington Color School painter Thomas Downing, an important early collaboration that shaped the development of both artists at a formative moment.

With the fortuitous patronage of the noted collector Vincent Melzac, Mehring was able to devote himself entirely to painting during his most productive years. Melzac's sustained support represented an unusually generous form of patronage for a working artist of the period, and it allowed Mehring to pursue his practice with a freedom that few of his contemporaries enjoyed. He was additionally fortunate to have the support of the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, who included Mehring in his landmark exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964 entitled Post Painterly Abstraction, one of the defining exhibitions in the history of Color Field painting.

Mehring's mature paintings are characterized by their soft, atmospheric stained fields of color and their carefully considered compositional structures. Working with unprimed canvas and thinned acrylic paint, he produced luminous pictures in which the color soaks directly into the fabric of the canvas, giving the surface an unusual sense of light and space. His signature all-over compositions of diamond-shaped color patches, along with his hard-edge chevron and geometric compositions of the 1960s, established him as one of the most distinctive voices within the Washington Color School.

Mehring's paintings are held today in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and other major American collections. His work has undergone significant reassessment in recent years, as scholars have restored his central place within the story of postwar American abstraction.