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. (See Departing from the rectangular below.)

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...."

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 'American Flag 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.

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