Howard Mehring (1931–1978) was a twentieth-centurypainter born inWashington, D.C.

Howard Mehring is associated withColor Field painting and theWashington Color School and the artists at Jefferson Place Gallery. Mehring and Robert Gates both received grants from The Woodward Foundation to travel inEurope during 1971 to broaden their art backgrounds. His connection withVincent Melzac was instrumental in developing his work. Early in his career (1956–1958) he shared studio space withThomas Downing, with whom he had been a student ofKenneth Noland atCatholic University. Some of their paintings from that period are difficult to tell apart.

Mehring's early work is a "Washington version" ofabstract expressionism, with the loose handling of paint on a surface but a much more transparent use ofmagna paint, anacrylic paint developed byLeonard Bocour. The stylistic resemblance toMountains and Sea byHelen Frankenthaler is obvious.

As Mehring developed as an artist his work became much more structured. He went from a painted surface with an all-over pattern to cutting up canvas with the all-over pattern and gluing it back together. Later he used some of those same forms to make "hard-edge paintings", such asChroma Double from 1965, in the collection of theHonolulu Museum of Art.

Mehring and the otherWashington Color School painters were in debt to the writings ofClement Greenberg. In 1964 Greenberg included Mehring in his traveling museum exhibition calledPost-painterly Abstraction.

• Introduction & Text by Roy Slade, "The Corcoran & Washington Art" Copyright 1976 The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: 2000 copies printed by Garamond Press, Baltimore, MD LCCC# 76-42098
• Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Interview with Gerald Nordland Conducted by Susan Larsen, Chicago, Illinois May 25–26, 2004http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/nordla04.htm
• Washington Art, catalog of exhibitions at State University College at Potsdam, NY & State University of New York at Albany, 1971 [no copyright or LCCC # listed], Introduction by Renato G. Danese, printed by Regal Art Press, Troy NY.
• The Vincent Melzac Collection, Foreword byWalter Hopps, Introduction by Ellen Gross Landau, Retrospective Notes on the Washington Color School byBarbara Rose, Copyright 1971 The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: printed by Garamond/Pridemark Press, Baltimore, MD LCCC#75-153646
• Howard Mehring, Conner Contemporary Art, Washington D. C.,http://www.connercontemporary.com/artists/howard-mehring/

• Washington Post Obituary

• 20th-century American painters
• American male painters
• American abstract painters
• 1931 births
• 1978 deaths
• Catholic University of America alumni
• Painters from Washington, D.C.
• 20th-century American male artists

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