Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, M-Q):
| Kenneth Noland (b. 1924)
Born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1924, Kenneth Noland is best known as a pioneering member of the group termed Color Field painters by art critic Clement Greenburg. As a young man in the 1940s, Noland served in the Air Force as a glider pilot and cryptographer. With the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he studied art at Black Mountain College, near his childhood home. The school developed a reputation as an outpost of European modernist sensibility and a training ground for abstract painters. Noland's influential teachers included Josef Albers and especially Ilya Bolotowsky. As a student, Noland committed himself to abstract painting, but he recognized a need to break, at least temporarily, from the hard-edged geometric abstraction rooted in the Bauhaus and work by Mondrian that permeated the Black Mountain College.
In 1948 Noland left for a year of study in Paris. He developed an appreciation for the way preeminent colorist Henri Matisse displayed mastery of paint, later commenting "To paint out of Matisse, or to use color, you had to learn how to use the materials."(1) This preoccupation with the formal properties of his chosen materials would become a defining characteristic of Noland's career. While abroad, Noland also became interested in the emotional and symbolic qualities of Paul Klee's painting. When Noland returned to the United States, he settled near family and began teaching art in Washington, D.C. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Noland's work typically incorporated a selection of recognizable symbols – as in this untitled painting – revealing the influence of Klee as well as of early work by Jackson Pollock. At this time, Noland's technique involved building paint up in thick layers on the ground.
Within a few years, Noland’s style changed dramatically, a development closely linked to his friendship with fellow abstract artist Morris Louis, whom Noland met in 1952. Inspired by their shared passion for color and prompted by seeing poured stain paintings in Helen Frankenthaler's studio during a trip to New York in 1953, the two artists began collaborating on series of "jam paintings." These experiments in soaking large, unstretched canvases with diluted acrylic paint set new directions for each artist's oeuvre when they returned to working independently. For Noland, the dynamics of color became the primary subject matter of his painting.
Although Noland began showing his work in New York in 1956, he has worked in the orbit of the New York art world, intentionally keeping himself apart at homes in Washington, D.C. and New England, except for a brief period in the early 1960s. In addition to painting prolifically and usually in series—notably circle paintings, then chevrons, then stripes, then circles again—Noland has had a long career as a teacher at institutions including Catholic University and Bennington College. His work has been the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and is included in the collections of museums worldwide.
1. Kenneth Noland, interview with Paul Cummings (1971), quoted in Kenworth Moffett, Kenneth Noland (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977), p. 19.
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Biography from AskART:
| First gaining notice in the late 1950s, Kenneth Noland was a member of the group of Color Field abstract painters promoted by New York Times critic, Clement Greenberg. Noland began with a series of luminous, stained canvases of concentric circles, and focused on the center of the picture, which he regarded as symbolizing all possibilities and the specific genius of the work. With his concentric circles surrounding the "bulls eye," he combined a staining method that softened the acrylic paint of the center but gave the effect of reinforcing or echoing it.
In the next 40 years, he experimented with shaped canvases, stripe paintings, and chevrons, always remaining true to his idea of relying on color as his primary vehicle. In the 1990s, he seemed to have gone full "circle," back to the concentric shapes of his early work.
In a New York Times review by Grace Glueck, September 6, 2002, Noland stated: "I do not like representation in painting."
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Kenneth Noland was born on April 10, 1924 in Asheville, North Carolina; his father was an amateur painter. He studied with Abstractionists Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. He was a member of the group of Color Field abstract painters promoted by the New York Times critic, Clement Greenberg. He taught at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and at Bennington College.
He rarely painted on canvases smaller than 4 ft. by 4 ft. His choices range from mural size to mere slivers, from having the standard four sides to irregularly shaped profiles, from stained surfaces to thickly textured ones. Yet he did not want machinelike perfection; he deliberately left the splatter of orange on yellow in one of his paintings. He dared to parallel magenta, russet, beige and maroon and other combinations of color in a lollipop war of taste. His most striking contribution to the art of the 1960s was his mastery of color.
Noland and his wife, art historian Peggy Schiffer, lived north of Manhattan in a large, white, clapboard house with spreading grounds and a sculpture garden. He worked in a red barn on the property. He redesigned the space to make room for many related activities, among them the rag paper he made by hand in the basement.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
Time Magazine, January 8, 1965
R.H. Love in ARTnews, November 1986
Architectural Digest Visits Kenneth Noland by Phyllis Tuchman
Mark Stevens in Newsweek, May 16, 1977
Temple Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, 1986-87
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Kenneth Noland is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Abstract Expressionism
Modernism
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