Hard edge, a response to gestural

The term Hard Edged was coined by art critic Jules Langsner and art historian Peter Selz, to describe a tendency that was becoming prominent in the late 1950s in the work of multiple California-based abstract artists. The tendency was towards flat compositions with distinct delineations between shapes and fields of color. Langsner first used the term in his catalogue essay for the exhibition Four Abstract Classicists, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1959. Hard edges were not new to abstract painting, however. The tradition is, in fact, a part of many ancient aesthetic traditions, and had even previously manifested in the work of earlier Modernist abstract painters, such as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.