Kenneth Noland
(1924–)
(–2010)
Kenneth Noland
1924–2010
Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He was an American painter, best known for color field paintings. His hallmark technique involved staining the canvas with thinned paints, arranging colours in concentric rings and parallels in relation to the shape of the canvas.
He studied at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, from 1946–1948, and with sculptor Ossip Zadkins in Paris from 1948-49, where he developed an early interest in the emotional effects of colour and geometric forms. Noland revisited Black Mountain College in 1950 to attend its now-famous summer programs, where critic Clement Greenberg introduced him to Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg later championed Noland’s practice as exemplary of post-painterly abstraction. Noland moved to Washington D.C. in 1949 to teach, first at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and then at the Catholic University of America. Soon thereafter he helped establish the Washington Color School movement.
Noland began working with unprimed canvas after being inspired during a 1953 visit to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio in New York with Greenberg. He adapted Frankenthaler’s staining technique to his more rigidly geometric forms, which differ notably from the former’s poured organic compositions. Noland’s signature circle paintings deployed a wide range of acrylic hues, creating chevrons, diamonds, horizontal bands, and plaid patterns on variously shaped canvases of often monumental proportions. In his later work, these concentric orbs shrunk in scale and rendered with thicker layers of colour.
In 1964, Noland was featured in the Venice Biennale and was then honoured with his first solo retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1977), which then toured to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1977), and the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (1978). Noland has since been featured in most major national and regional art institutions around the world, including the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among many others.
