Often associated with Abstract Expressionism, color field painting is characterized by flat areas of color spread across the picture plane. During the late 1940s, artists strove to reduce each medium to its essential elements, an idea known as medium specificity. For painting, this meant creating works that emphasized the materiality of paint on canvas, moving away from any kind of illusionary depth. Color field painting had no figure or ground, only flat stretches of paint. Some artists in this period, notably Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, practiced what was known as stain painting. Rather than coating the canvas with a layer of primer before beginning their composition, they painted directly on raw canvas, allowing the saturated pigments to sink into the fibers and form ethereal swaths of tone. The mid-century critic Clement Greenberg was a major proponent of color field painting, which he called post-painterly abstraction. Greenberg championed the work of Mark Rothko, who painted sublime compositions of soft-edged rectangles in harmonious combinations of color.

Color field painting was a dominant style in American art from the end of the 1940s until the 1970s. Other artists who are associated with this style include Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Richard Diebenkorn, Jules Olitski, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons. Their influence can still be seen in the contemporary work of artists like Stanley Whitney and Sean Scully.