A term introduced by the American critic Clement Greenberg in the title of an exhibition he curated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. Greenberg believed he had identified a new movement in painting that turned away from the dense, “painterly” surfaces of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 50s and took a more rigorous approach to abstraction. The painters in Greenberg’s LACMA exhibition included Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Ellsworth Kelly.

Ellsworth Kelly. Green Blue Red. Oil on canvas. 1963. The Broad, Los Angeles.