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John McLaughlin (b. 1898, Sharon, MA - d. 1976, Dana Point, CA) acted as the missing link between constructivism and perceptualism and had a profound impact on two generations of advanced, reductive California artists, among them Robert Irwin, Robert Ryman, Larry Bell and many more. McLaughlin wanted the viewer in his own words to " contemplate his relationship to nature uninhibited by the tyranny of the object"

"Deliberately neutral in character, John McLaughlin's forms might be described as anonymous. Essentially color serves him as a means of defining and regulating a form's relative importance in the composition. Each painting represents the outcome of a process of refinement."
--Jules Langsner, Four Abstract Classicists, LACMA 1959

"My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract. I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer's natural desire for contemplation without benefit of a guiding principle. I must therefore free the viewer from the demands or special qualities imposed by the particular by omitting the image (object). This I manage by the use of neutral forms. The uncompromised form by virtue of its power to withhold neither reveals or conceals. Its function is merely to indicate that reality may be sensed by the viewer when released from the insistent demands of substantive quality. The reservoir of total experience may be reflected by the void or anonymous form. With respect to my direct influences I must stress my interest in 15th and 16th century Japanese painters. I have found comfort in some aspects of thought expressed by Malevitch, and I am indebted to Mondrian because his painting strongly indicated that the natural extension of Neo-Plasticism is the totally abstract."
--John McLaughlin, Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1963, n.p.