Byline: BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

WHEN IT POURS

Works by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.

Two new shows of color-field paintings from the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties-by Helen Frankenthaler, at Gagosian, and by Morris Louis, at Mnuchin-recall a time when such works served as intellectual battle flags in the dispute over what painting should be. The movement was mentored by the critic Clement Greenberg as the inevitable next phase after Abstract Expressionism. Inspired by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, color-field aimed for "purely optical" effects-the works were dead flat, eschewed drawn line, and referred to nothing. They were made by pouring paint onto unstretched canvases laid on the floor, or, in the case of Jules Olitski, by applying the paint with a spray gun. Color-field reacted against the juicy, muscular styles of Willem de Kooning and his many followers, which Greenberg deemed spurious and passe. It won that scrap, in the court of uptown galleries, but soon succumbed to the juggernauts of Pop art and minimalism, which had behind them forces of more than rarefied aesthetic theory: by 1962, Andy Warhol's silk-screened works equalled the formal strength of color-field and surpassed its eclat, with the added bonus of Marilyn Monroe. Greenberg's dialectic made color-field sound formidable, but the art proved lightweight in practice, a genteel sort of taste-the visual equivalent of second-Martini euphoria. Still, some gifted artists espoused it, none better than Frankenthaler, its effective inventor, and Louis, its sternest reductionist.

The two shows, in their timing, attest to one nice effect of today's ravening art market: the scramble of dealers and collectors for undervalued goods, which affords the rest of us fresh encounters with the artists who made them. It's not as if Louis, who died, of cancer, at the age of forty-nine, in 1962, and Frankenthaler, who survived in grand style until 2011, are obscure. Their work hangs in museums and sells, at auction, for respectable six-figure sums, with the odd spike into the low millions. But compare that to the example...