Kenneth Noland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kenneth Noland (born April 10, 1924) is an American 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.

Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina. Noland attended the experimental Black Mountain College. 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 they adopted Helen Frankenthaler's “soak-stain” technique of allowing acrylic paint to soak into unprimed canvases. Noland’s 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, 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. His shaped canvases are highly irregular and asymmetrical. This results in increasingly complex structures of control and 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).

[edit] 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.