Kenneth Noland
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Kenneth Noland
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Noland, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1967 (credit: © Arnold Newman)
Noland, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1967 (credit: © Arnold Newman)
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Kenneth Noland
(b Asheville, NC, 10 April 1924). American painter and sculptor. He served in the US Air Force from 1942 to 1946 and after his discharge took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE in North Carolina. There he was taught by Ilya Bolotowsky, learning about Neo-plasticism and Mondrian; he also had one course with Josef Albers, whom he found rigid and doctrinaire but from whom he learnt about Bauhaus theories. During this period he also developed an interest in Paul Klee's work, especially in his use of colour. In 1948, again under the G.I. Bill, Noland travelled to Paris. There he studied sculpture in Ossip Zadkine's studio and, guided by him, also painted, though Zadkine's Cubist aesthetic seemed a little old-fashioned to him after his Bauhaus training. While in Paris he also saw paintings by Picasso, Mir? and Matisse and in 1949 had his first one-man show at the Galerie Raymond Creuze.
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Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
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Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland (born 1924) became a major American color-field painter. His works, extremely abstract in feeling, are strong in the splendor of the colors and their taut control.
Kenneth Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on April 10, 1924. After serving in the Air Force in World War II, he used the G.I. bill to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1946 to 1949. There he worked under Ilya Bolotowsky, whose painting, a combination of geometrical design derived from the Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian and very personal color choices, had some influence on Noland's later work. Noland also studied sculpture and painting with Ossip Zadkine in Paris in 1948. While in Paris he had his first oneman show, in 1949.
In 1949 Noland moved to Washington, D.C., where he taught at the Institute of Contemporary Art and then at Catholic University (until 1960). He also was an instructor at the Washington Workshop of the Arts, and there, in 1953, he met the painter Morris Louis. The two became friends and often traveled together to New York. On one visit they went to Helen Frankenthaler's studio, where they saw Mountains and Seas (1952), which had been influenced by the paintings of Jackson Pollock. This work, with its airy and delicate washes of stained pigment, greatly influenced both painters.
After a period of experimentation, Noland's mature art emerged in 1958, when he began a series of stain paintings (using thin pigment to stain raw canvas) usually showing a "target" made up of concentric circles. Since there was little variety of shape, attention was placed solely on the vivid hues and their relationships. Moreover, the colors seemed disembodied and purely optical, owing to the stunning effect of the staining technique, which eliminated any tactile difference between painted and unpainted areas. The softness, which also resulted from staining, mitigated the potential brittleness of the geometric design. The extreme flatness of the painting created a powerful impact, and color pulses seemed to radiate from the canvas.
Noland tended to work in series, keeping his layouts constant while exploring different color possibilities. In 1962 he changed his format by suspending a series of colored chevrons from the top of the picture. These dramatic paintings, along with his concentric-circle pictures, were shown in the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1964. The following year Noland received a retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York City, where he had moved in 1961. With Louis and other painters in Washington, D.C., Noland became known as the Washington Color Painters.
After 1964 Noland filled the entire surface of his paintings with colored bands, giving them a forceful and compact presence. He employed either a diamond-shaped canvas to accommodate chevrons or diagonal color stripes, or simply placed horizontal bands within a long, horizontally shaped format. The latter layout permitted him the greatest range of expressive color. After 1964, Noland was included among the artists known as the post-painterly abstractionists.
During the late 1960s Noland began to make sculptures, and in the 1970s made sculptures of sheet steel. In the early 1970s, Noland introduced a grid structure into his paintings, reminiscent of Mondrian. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he began working with irregularly shaped canvases, and by the mid-1980s he returned to his earlier chevron designs but with thicker paint. A 1995 exhibition in New York, Kenneth Noland at Leo Castelli, covered 35 years of Noland's work, starting with two target paintings from 1960 and ending with paintings from his Flare and Flow series of the 1990s, multipanel paintings with capricious curved shapes, sometimes separated by strips of colored Plexiglas.
Further Reading
Comprehensive works on Noland include Kenworth Moffett's Kenneth Noland (1977); Diane Waldman's Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective (1977); and K. Wilkin's Kenneth Noland (1990).
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Kenneth Noland
Noland, Kenneth (nō'lənd), 1924-2010, American painter, b. Asheville, N.C. An outstanding colorist, Noland was one of the best-known exponents of the abstract painting movement known as color-field painting. He experimented with bands of pure color in bull's-eye and chevron motifs and horizontal parallel stripes, emphasizing the flatness of his usually large canvases and the vibrancy of his colors by staining paint into raw canvas and using uniform color values. In his work color itself is the subject. Later paintings treat plaid designs with muted color bands of varied width.
Bibliography
See R. H. Love, Kenneth Noland: Major Works (1986); K. Wilkin, Kenneth Noland (1990); A. de Lima Greene and K. Wilkin, Kenneth Noland: The Nature of Color (museum catalog, 2005).
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Kenneth Noland
| Kenneth Noland | |
|---|---|
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| Born | April 10, 1924 Asheville, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Died | January 5, 2010 (aged 85) Port Clyde, Maine, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Abstract art |
| Training | Black Mountain College |
| Movement | Color Field painting |
| Influenced by | Helen Frankenthaler, Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Josef Albers |
Kenneth Noland (April 10, 1924 – January 5, 2010) was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977 he was honored by a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. and the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio in 1978. In 2006 Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.
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Biography
Early life and education
A son of Harry Caswell Noland (1896–1975), a pathologist, and his wife, Bessie (1897–1980), Kenneth Clifton Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He had four siblings: Lawrence, Billie, Neil, and Harry Jr.[1][2]
Noland enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1942 after completing high school. A veteran of World War II Noland took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study art at Black Mountain College in his home state of North Carolina.[3] He attended the experimental Black Mountain College (two of his brothers studied art there as well) and studied with Ilya Bolotowsky, a professor who introduced him to Neo-plasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian. There Noland also studied Bauhaus theory and color under Josef Albers[4] and he became interested in Paul Klee, specifically his sensitivity to color.[5]
Career
In 1948 and 1949 Noland worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and had his first exhibition of his paintings there. In the early 1950s he met Morris Louis in Washington DC while teaching night classes at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts. He became friends with Louis, and after being introduced by Clement Greenberg to Helen Frankenthaler and seeing her new paintings at her studio in New York City in 1953 he and Louis adopted her “soak-stain” technique of allowing thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases.[6]
Most of Noland's paintings fall into one of four groups: circles, or targets (see Beginning illustrated), chevrons, (see infobox), stripes, and shaped canvases. His preoccupation with the relationship of the image to the containing edge of the picture led him to a series of studies of concentric rings, or bull’s-eyes, or as they were known - Targets - like the one reproduced here called Beginning from 1958, using unlikely color combinations. This also led him away from Morris Louis in 1958. In 1964 he was included in the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction curated by Clement Greenberg[7] which traveled the country and helped to firmly establish Color Field painting as an important new movement in the contemporary art of the 1960s. Noland pioneered the shaped canvas, initially with a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical diamonds or chevrons. In these paintings, the edges of the canvas become as structurally important as the center. During the 1970s and 1980s his shaped canvases were highly irregular and asymmetrical. These resulted in increasingly complex structures of highly sophisticated and controlled color and surface integrity. In 1964 Noland occupied half the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1965 his work was exhibited at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum (New York). In 1949 he had his first solo exhibition: Kenneth Noland, at the Galerie Creuze, in Paris. In 1957 he had the first solo exhibition of his paintings in New York at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery[8] and he had the final solo exhibition of his lifetime - Kenneth Noland Shaped Paintings 1981-82, which opened Oct 29 2009 at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on E.68th St. in New York City and was scheduled to close January 9, 2010, though, the closing date was later extended to January 16.[9]
Instead of painting the canvas with a brush, Noland’s style was to stain the canvas with color. This idea sought to remove the artist through brushstrokes. This made the piece about the art, not the artist. He emphasized spatial relationships in his work by leaving unstained, bare canvas as a contrast against the colors used throughout his paintings. Noland used simplified abstraction so the design would not detract from the use of color.[10]
Personal life
He was married to:[11]
- Cornelia Langer, a daughter of a Republican U. S. senator from North Dakota, William Langer. The couple married in 1950 and later divorced. They had three children: daughters Cady and Lyndon (aka Lyn) and a son, William.[12][13]
- Stephanie Gordon, a psychologist, lived with Noland from November 1964 until June 1970. They married April 1967 and divorced June 1970.[14]
- Peggy L. Schiffer, an art historian and daughter of Dr. Morton A. Schiffer.[5] Married circa 1970, the Nolands had one son, Samuel Jesse.[15][6][16][7]
- Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest, whom he married in Bennington, Vermont, on 10 April 1994.[8][17] Noland was her fifth husband; her previous spouses included Arthur F. Rense.
Noland had an affair in the 1960s with artist and socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer.[18]
Death
Noland died on January 5, 2010, of kidney cancer in his home in Port Clyde, Maine. He was 85 when he died.[19]
Selected museum collections
-
Bridge, 1964
- Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York;
- Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois;
- Australian National Gallery, Canberra;
- Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland;
- Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio;
- St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri;
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio;
- Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio;
- Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.;
- Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa;
- Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan;
- Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide;
- Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts;
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.;
- Kunsthaus, Zurich;
- Kunstmuseum, Basel;
- Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf;
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California;
- Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark;
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
- Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin;
- Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota;
- Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris;
- Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts;
- Museum of Modern Art, New York;
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.;
- Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California;
- Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.;
- Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts;
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York;
- Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
- Tate Gallery, London;
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota;
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Selected works
- (1958) Ex-Nihilio
- (1958) Lunar Episode
- (1958) Beginning
- (1958) Inside
- (1958) Heat
- (1959) And Half
- (1959) Split
- (1959) Extent
- (1960) Back and Front
- (1960) Earthen Bound
- (1960) Play
- (1961) Highlights
- (1961) Epigram
- (1961) Turnsole
- (1963) Ringing Bell
- (1963) Drifting
- (1963) East-West
- (1963) New Light
- (1963) Cadmium Radiance
- (1964) Baba Yagga
- (1964) Halfway
- (1964) And Again
- (1964) Tropical Zone
- (1964) Trans West
- (1966) Galore
- (1967) Summer Plain
- (1967) Stria
- (1967) Open End
- (1968) Transvaries
- (1969) Pan
- (1973) Interlocking Color
- (1973) Under Color
- (1975) Burnt Beige
- (1978) Oasis
- (1985) Snow and Ice
- (1989) Doors: Time Ahead
- (1999) Refresh
- (2000) Mysteries: Infanta
- (2000) Mysteries: Afloat
Notes
- ^ Parents' names and siblings from ancestry.com, found in 1930 North Carolina Federal Census as well as the North Carolina Birth Register listing of Noland's birth. Records accessed on 7 January 2010.
- ^ Noland's younger brother Neil (born 1927) became a sculptor, and like his brother Kenneth, he studied art at Black Mountain College, as did their brother Harry.
- ^ Obituaries state Noland was drafted in 1942 and served until 1946. An official enlistment record, however, states Noland, then 20, joined the Army Air Corps Reserves as a private at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi, on 24 May 1944. The record was accessed on ancestry.com on 7 January 2010.
- ^ retrieved February 8, 2008
- ^ retrieved December 30, 2007
- ^ Terry Fenton, online essay about Kenneth Noland, and acrylic paint, [1] accessed April 30th, 2007
- ^ "Clement Greenberg". Post-Painterly Abstraction. Retrieved January 11, 2010.
- ^ Terry Fenton, online about Kenneth Noland, [2] accessed January 6th, 2010
- ^ Artnet
- ^ [3]
- ^ Writer, artist, and arts administrator Michael Fallon has claimed that his maternal grandmother, Billie Ruth Sinclair (7 July 1925 - 2008), was Noland's first wife and that their brief marriage took place in Asheville, North Carolina in the mid 1940s. He wrote about the marriage in a 2007 essay on the website of Minnesota Artists (mnartists.org), a joint project of the Walker Arts Center and the McKnight Foundation.[4] A search on ancestry.com on 7 January 2010 revealed Kenneth C. Noland's Army Air Corps enlistment record, dated 24 May 1944, at Keesler Field, Biloxi, Mississippi, in which Pvt. Noland declares his marital status as married, though the name of his wife is not listed.
- ^ Noland's children have followed in their father's artistic footsteps. Cady Noland (born 1956) is an installation artist and Conceptual sculptor, Lyn Noland is a sculptor and Emmy award-winning camerawoman, and William Langer Noland is a photographer and sculptor and serves as an associate professor of the visual arts at Duke University.
- ^ Current Biography Yearbook 1972, page 330
- ^ World Artists, 1950-1980 (H. W. Wilson, 1980), page 626
- ^ Matt Schudel, "Kenneth Noland, 85: Abstract Painter, a founder of Washington Color School", The Washington Post, 7 January 2010
- ^ "Painting: Bold Emblems", Time, 18 April 1969
- ^ Date and place of marriage established through ancestry.com and viewing of the Vermont Marriage Index, 1989-2001.
- ^ Sally Bedell Smith, Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (Random House, 2005), page 234
- ^ Smith, Roberta (January 5, 2010). "Kenneth Noland, Color Field Artist, Is Dead at 85". The New York Times. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/kenneth-noland-color-field-artist-is-dead-at-85/. Retrieved January 5, 2010.
References
- Gowing, L (ed.) 1995, A Biographical Dictionary of Artists, Rev. edn, Andromeda Oxford Limited, Oxfordshire.
Further reading
- "Kenneth Noland." Contemporary Artists, 4th ed. St. James Press, 1996. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.
- "Kenneth Noland: Color, Format and Abstract Art." Interview by Diane waldman (1977), in: Teories and Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by K. Stiles and P. Selz, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 94–98.
- "Kenneth Noland." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.
- "Painting: Bold Emblems", an 18 April 1969 profile of Kenneth Noland in Time magazine
- "Art: Pure, Uncluttered Hedonism", a 2 May 1977 review of Kenneth Noland's work by Robert Hughes of Time magazine
- "Painting: Peacock Duo", an 8 May 1965 examination of Kenneth Noland's work
External links
- kennethnoland.com The official website of Kenneth Noland
- Kenneth Noland in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler collection
- Kenneth Noland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Kenneth Noland
- Tate08 Series: Kenneth Noland: The Stripe Paintings exhibition at Tate Liverpool, England, 2006
- [9] TheArtStory.com/Kenneth_Noland
- [10] Kenneth Noland at The Phillips Collection
- New York Times artblog by Roberta Smith
- New York Times Obituary
- Washington Post Obituary
- The Guardian Obituary
- The Independent Obituary
- Times Online Obituary
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color-field painting
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