In the Key of Blue was included in the The Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s seminal 1965 exhibition, The Washington Color Painters. Featuring work by Howard Mehring, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, and Paul Reed, the show is widely considered one of the first organized presentations of this group of painters who would later come to be known as “The Washington Color School.” The exhibition also marks the probable origins of the movement’s moniker. Beyond geographic similarities, living and working in the D.C. area in the 1950s and 1960s, the artists were united by a shared interest in capitalizing on newly available acrylic paints, often thinned and soaked or stained into an unprimed canvas, to develop new modes of abstract painting characterized by an assertion of the primacy and expressive capacities of pure color.
