Shaped canvas
Shaped canvas paintings are done on canvas in a shape other than the traditional, flat rectangle. This may be more traditionally done by creating a different edge form and retaining a flat painting surface, as in a tondo made on a circular stretcher or panel, or less traditionally by moving the surface by stuffing or padding the surface, or stretching the canvas across a shaped stretcher. More rarely, shaped holes or apertures may be cut in the canvas, changing the topology of the surface. All of these alterations - whether deviating from the rectangular shape, the flatness, or the topological wholeness of the standard canvas - result in work that sits at the tide mark between painting and sculpture.
Representational modes often require realist paintings to be like a flat window pane. The neutral form of a flat rectangular canvas is an assumption in painting which is challenged by the shaped canvas. The argument is that all paintings have a thickness which prevents them being truly flat.
Pioneers of modern shaped-canvas painting
According to thehistorymakers.com, abstract painter Edward Clark (born 1926 in New Orleans) is the first painter credited with working on a shaped canvas (in the modern sense); his first shaped canvas was shown at New York’s Brata Gallery in 1957.
The claim that Clark invented this medium is disputable, however. According to art reviewer Francis V. O’Connor, “The shaped canvas … was invented for modernist purposes in the 1930s by Abraham Joel Tobias.” [2]. He refers the reader to Jeffrey Wechsler’s exhibition catalogue, Abraham Joel Tobias: Sculptural Painting of the 1930s (see References section). Mr. O’Connor would appear to be a respected authority on modern art, having written the exhibition catalogue for the 1967 Jackson Pollock exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Rutgers University’s discussion of a Tobias exhibition there notes that while “the first significant art historical attention paid to shaped canvases occurred in the 1960s”, Tobias indeed had already created such works in the 1930s (see external links for this, including an image). Perhaps, then, Edward Clark can be credited with reviving rather than inventing the shaped canvas in the postwar period - whether or not he was aware of earlier shaped-canvas art.
Between the late 1950s through the mid 1960s Jasper Johns experimented with shaped and compartmentalized canvases, notably with his ‘American Flag Painting’ - one canvas placed on top of another, larger canvas. Robert Rauschenberg’s experimental assemblages and “combines” of the 1950s also explored variations of divided and shaped canvas. Assigning a date to the origin of the postwar shaped canvas painting may not be possible, but certainly it had emerged by the late 1950s.
Postwar modern art and the shaped canvas
Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Ronald Davis, Neil Williams, David Novros, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Geometric abstract artists, minimalists, and Hard-edge painters may, for example, elect to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. There is a connection here with post-painterly abstraction, which reacts against the abstract expressionists’ mysticism, hyper-subjectivity, and emphasis on making the act of painting itself dramatically visible - as well as their solemn acceptance of the flat rectangle as an almost ritual prerequisite for serious painting.
The apertured, superimposed, multiple canvases of Jane Frank in the 1960s and 1970s are a special case: while generally flat and rectangular, they are rendered sculptural by the presence of large, irregularly shaped holes in the forward canvas or canvases, through which one or more additional painted canvases can be seen. She also favors colors, textures, and shapes that are complex, nuanced, and organic or earthen - giving her work a brooding or introspective quality that further sets it apart from that of many other shaped-canvas painters.
Pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist also took up the shaped canvas medium. Robin Landa (An Introduction to Design, 1983) writes that “Wesselmann uses the shape of the container [by which Landa means the canvas] to express the organic quality of smoke” in his “smoker” paintings.
More recent shaped canvas art
Among shaped-canvas artists of more recent generations, Elizabeth Murray (born 1940) has produced playfully “exploding” canvases, in which exuberance of shape and color seems to force itself outside the normative rectangle - or, as a 1981 New York Times review put it: “…the inner shapes blast off from their moorings and cause the whole painting to fly apart.”
Singapore’s Anthony Poon (1945-2006), continued the tradition of cool, abstract, minimalist geometry associated with the shaped canvas in the 1960s. The analytical poise and undulating repetitions in his work somewhat recall the work of modular constructivist sculptors such as Erwin Hauer and Norman Carlberg.
The globetrotting Filipina artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004) stuffed and stitched her painted canvases for a three-dimensonal effect, combining this technique with free-wheeling mixed media effects, riotous color, and abstract patterning suggestive of festive homemade textiles, or of party trappings such as streamers, balloons, or confetti. The total effect is joyously extrovert and warm - quite opposed to both the minimalist and pop art versions of “cool”.
In reference to the shaped paintings of Jack Reilly (born 1950), Robin Landa (op. cit.) emphasizes the power of the shaped canvas to create a sensation of movement: “Many contemporary artists feel that the arena of painting can be greatly extended by the use of shaped canvases. Movement is established in the container (canvas) itself as well as in the internal space of the container.”
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