Shaped canvas

Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the '' tondo'', a painting on a round panel or canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance painters, sometimes chose this format for madonna paintings. Alternatively, canvases may be altered by losing their flatness and assuming a three-dimensional surface. Or, they can do both. That is, they can assume shapes other than rectangles, and also have surface features that are three-dimensional. Arguably, changing the surface configuration of the painting transforms it into a sculpture. But shaped canvases are generally considered paintings.

Apart from any aesthetic considerations, there are technical matters, having to do with the very nature of canvas as a material, that tend to support the flat rectangle as the norm for paintings on canvas.

In the literature of art history and criticism, the term ''shaped canvas'' is particularly associated with certain works created mostly in New York after about 1960, during a period when a great variety and quantity of such works were produced. According to the commentary at a Rutgers University exhibition site, "... the first significant art historical attention paid to shaped canvases occurred in the 1960s...."

Pioneers of modern shaped-canvas painting

Peter Laszlo Peri created polychromatic “cut-out” paintings as part of the Constructivist movement between 1921 and 1924. These works which anticipate “shaped canvas” created after 1945 were exhibited widely in the 1920s, notably in two joint exhibitions with László Moholy-Nagy at Der Sturm Gallery, Berlin, 1922 and 1923, and at the International Exhibition of Modern Art assembled by Societe Anonyme Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1926.

Abraham Joel Tobias made "shaped canvases" in the 1930s. Uruguayan artist Rhod Rothfuss began to experience with "marco irregular" paintings in 1942, late in 1944 publish in Arturo magazine your seminal text "El marco: un problema de la plástica actual" Munich-born painter Rupprecht Geiger exhibited "shaped canvases" in 1948 in Paris, France.
Paintings exhibited by the New Orleans born abstract painter Edward Clark shown at New York's Brata Gallery in 1957 have also been termed shaped canvas paintings.

Between the late 1950s through the mid-1960s Jasper Johns experimented with shaped and compartmentalized canvases, notably with his ' Three Flags' 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. Argentine artist Lucio Fontana also began early on the experiment in shaped and compartmentalized canvases with his Concetto Spaziale, Attese series in 1959. 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

Frances Colpitt ("The Shape of Painting in the 1960s"; '' Art Journal'', Spring 1991) states flatly that "the shaped canvas was the dominant form of abstract painting in the 1960s". She writes that the shaped canvas, "although frequently described as a hybrid of painting and sculpture, grew out of the issues of abstract painting and was evidence of the desire of painters to move into real space by rejecting behind-the-frame illusionism." .

Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Charles Hinman Ronald Davis, Richard Tuttle, Leo Valledor, Neil Williams, John Levee, David Novros, Robert Mangold, Gary Stephan, Paul Mogenson, Clark Murray, 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.
While the shaped canvas first challenged the formalized rectangular shape of paintings, it soon questioned the constraints of two-dimensionality. According to Donald Judd in his ''Complete Writings'': 'The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself: it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or in it". In 1964, the Solomun R. Guggenheim Museum organised the definitive exhibition 'The Shaped Canvas" curated by Lawrence Alloway. Lucy Lippard noted that this show focused exclusively on paintings with a "one -sided continuous surface" In 1965, Frank Stella and Frank Geldzahler confronted this definition of the shaped canvas by introducing three-dimensional shaped canvases by artists Charles Hinman and Will Insley in their seminal group show "Shape and Structure" at Tibor de Naguy in New York. The invasion of the third dimension by paintings was an important development of the shaped canvas as it questioned the frontier between painting and sculpture.

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. A student of Hans Hofmann, and sharing his concern for pictorial depth as well as his reverence for nature, 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.

In the late 1960s, Trevor Bell, a leading member of the British St. Ives group

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