Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland, whose brilliantly colored concentric circles, chevrons and stripes were among the most recognized and admired signatures of the postwar style of abstraction known as Color Field painting, … arrived on the scene in the immediate aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. A student of the geometric abstractionists Josef Albers and Ilya Bolotowsky, he found his way toward geometric forms that served as vessels for vibrant washes of color stained into the canvas. In successive series of paintings, he introduced subtle changes into geometric forms that evolved from circles, chevrons, stripes and diamonds and back again to the circle late in his career.

In 1960 the highly influential critic Clement Greenberg proclaimed Mr. Noland and Morris Louis major figures in American art, the rightful successors to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Of Mr. Noland’s concentric-circle paintings, he wrote in Art International: “His color counts by its clarity and its energy; it is not there neutrally, to be carried by the design and drawing; it does the carrying itself.”

“He was one of the great colorists of the 20th century,” said the art critic Karen Wilkins, the author of a monograph on Mr. Noland. “Along with Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, he invented a new kind of American abstraction based on the primacy of color. It had some of the philosophic underpinnings of Abstract Expressionism, but without the Sturm and Drang. He picked up where Matisse left off and moved painting into a new visual language.”

Noland lost his battle with cancer today.

Text sourced from New York Times.