The term Post-Painterly Abstraction, also used in its translation "post-painterly abstraction," is the now-general term for abstract American art movements from the 1950s and 1960s onward, including Hard Edge, Color Field Painting, and Systemic Painting. The term was coined by critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) to characterize a broad trend in American painting when abstract painters reacted in a variety of ways against the gestural qualities of Abstract Expressionism. The effort was to create a purely objective art that ruthlessly discarded any references to the outside world and to explore new compositional approaches.
Helen Frankenthaler 
