Kenneth Noland

(click to enlarge)
Noland, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1967 (credit: © Arnold Newman)

(born April 10, 1924, Asheville, N.C., U.S.) U.S. painter. Noland attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina and studied under the French sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris (1948 – 49). He and Morris Louis, influenced by the work of Helen Frankenthaler, worked together on the technique of staining with thinned paints. This method presented pure, saturated colour as an integral part of the canvas. He employed his colours in concentric rings and parallels that were shaped and proportioned in relation to the shape of the canvas. Noland taught at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (1950 – 52) and at Catholic University (1951 – 60), both in Washington, D.C., and at Bennington College (1968) in Vermont.

For more information on Kenneth Noland, visit Britannica.com.

(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.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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).

Kenneth Noland
Bridge, 1964
Born	April 10, 1924 (1924-04-10) (age 85) Asheville, North Carolina
Nationality	American
Field	Abstract art
Training	Black Mountain College
Movement	Color Field painting
Influenced by	Helen Frankenthaler, Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Josef Albers

Kenneth Noland (born April 10, 1924) is an American abstract painter. He is identified today as one of the best-known contemporary 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.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Further reading 3 References 4 External links 5 Notes

Biography

Kenneth Noland, Beginning, magna on canvas painting by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1958

Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina. A veteran of World War II he joined the U.S. Air Force in 1942. After his discharge four years later, Noland took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study art at Black Mountain College in his home state of North Carolina. Noland attended the experimental Black Mountain College and he studied with professor Ilya Bolotowsky who introduced him to Neo-plasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian. There he also studied Bauhaus theory and color with Josef Albers^[1] and he became interested in Paul Klee, specifically his sensitivity to color.^[2] In 1948 and 1949 he worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and in the early 1950s met Morris Louis in Washington DC. He became friends with Louis, and after seeing her new paintings at her studio in New York City in 1953 they adopted Helen Frankenthaler's “soak-stain” technique of allowing thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases.^[3]

Most of Noland's paintings fall into one of four groups: circles, or targets (see Beginning illustrated), chevrons, (see infobox), stripes (see Warm Above illustrated), 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 Louis in 1958. 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).

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." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.

References

Gowing, L (ed.) 1995, A Biographical Dictionary of Artists, Rev. edn, Andromeda Oxford Limited, Oxfordshire.

External links

• kennethnoland.com The official website of Kenneth Noland
• Tate08 Series: Kenneth Noland: The Stripe Paintings exhibition at Tate Liverpool, England, 2006

Notes

1. ^ retrieved February 8, 2008
2. ^ retrieved December 30, 2007
3. ^ Terry Fenton, online essay about Kenneth Noland, and acrylic paint, [1] accessed April 30th, 2007

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