Color Field Painter Kenneth Noland Dies. Career Beginnings in DC

Kenneth Noland (American, 1924-2010). Spread, 1958. Oil on canvas. 117 x 117 in. (297.2 x 297.2 cm). Gift of William S. Rubin, 1964.20. Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection.© Kenneth Noland / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The brilliant colors of painter Kenneth Noland’s concentric shapes and stripes dimmed Tuesday (1/5/10) when the founding Color Field artist died in Maine. Noland, who was 85, lost his battle with cancer after an expansive career that began in the immediate aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. He used that as the foundation for his postwar style known as Color Field, in which he stained canvas with vibrant washes of color into circles, chevrons, stripes, and diamonds. “He was one of the great colorists of the 20th century,” art critic Karen Wilkin said. “He picked up where Matisse left off and moved painting into a new visual language.”

Noland first picked up a paintbrush after a visit to the National Gallery in Washington at 14, which left him particularly fascinated with Monet. But it was Matisse who greatly affected the chromatic master’s ideas about art, prompting him to develop “color structure.” Despite the art world’s return to less abstract art, Noland stuck by his staining and free-form shapes on large, sometimes oddly shaped canvases, knowing, like the circles he often painted, “young artists will return” to the form he established...

...Exposure to the work of Matisse in Paris profoundly affected Mr. Noland’s ideas about art and inspired him to develop what he called “color structure. Returning to the United States, he settled in Washington, where he taught at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Catholic University of America, and became friends with the somewhat older Morris Louis, a fellow teacher at Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, an evening art school.

Both men, under the influence of Ms. Frankenthaler, began experimenting with stain technique, thinning their paint and applying it to unprimed canvas to create translucent layers of color that revealed the canvas surface. This approach dovetailed perfectly with (Art Critic, Clement) Greenberg’s dictum that the destiny of painting, as it approached pure self-referentiality, was to become ever flatter... - NYTimes via The Daily Beast

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