Kenneth Noland: The Color of Nature

HOUSTON, Texas - A pioneer in Color Field painting of the 1960s, an artist whose work has achieved iconic status, Kenneth Noland has been a major painter for over four decades. His "target" canvases of concentric bands of color, his V-shaped chevrons and his stripe and plaid paintings are widely familiar.

Although it is called a survey, not a retrospective, this smallish but comprehensive exhibition, covering every phase of Noland's long career, demonstrates that his achievements have gone well beyond the breakthrough art of four decades ago to superb work in the new century. It will help solidify Noland's special niche in Twentieth Century American art.

"Kenneth Noland: The Nature of Color" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through March 6. Exhibited are 28 paintings that reflect each major series in the artist's oeuvre, starting in 1958 and including works completed in 2002.

Throughout his career Noland has emphasized the formal properties of painting, as opposed to depiction and illustration. Above all, he has been concerned with color. A masterful colorist, he excels at applying color to a series of geometric forms or properties.

"In Noland's hands," Wilkin writes in the catalog, "the orchestration and placement of colors have been, almost for the first time in Western art, completely detached from specific references or symbolic meanings. Instead, the powerful associative powers of colors and color harmonies, like music, are made the carriers of profound, wordless, perhaps even irrational emotions"

The Houston exhibition is organized around a chronological presentation of works from his major series: "Circles," 1958-62; "Diamonds Chevrons," 1963-66; "Stripes," 1968-69; "Plaids," 1971-73; "Rough Chevrons," 1986; "Doors," 1990; "New Circles," 1997-98, and "Mysteries," 1999-2002.

Noland was born in 1924 in Asheville, N.C. into a middle-class family. His mother was an amateur musician and his father a weekend painter who let young Kenneth use his art supplies.

After attending Asheville public schools, Noland served four years in the Air Force as a glider pilot and cryptographer. From 1946 to 1948, aided by the GI Bill, he studied art at Black Mountain College, near Asheville. Under the leadership of Bauhaus stalwart Josef Albers, the college became a training ground for avant-garde painters.

Noland's principal mentor was veteran abstractionist Ilya Bolotowsky, who introduced him to the expressive possibilities of color and the geometric abstraction of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Both Albers and Bolotowsky left their mark on Noland's mature work.

During a year in Paris, Noland became keenly interested in the brilliant color harmonies of French artist Henri Matisse. "He's the master," says Noland of his favorite artist. "I think he [Matisse] might be the greatest artist who ever lived."

Returning to the States, Noland lived and worked in Washington, DC from 1949 to 1961. While teaching art at various institutions, including Catholic University, he frequented The Phillips Collection, where he fell under the sway of German artist, Paul Klee's color sense and compositional strategies, and of Matisse's expressive use of color. Noland's early work in Washington reflected the unmistakable influence of Klee and Matisse, plus some elements from Jackson Pollock's breakthrough art.

In 1952 Noland met Morris Louis, another young painter looking for new fields to conquer. They exchanged ideas about art, including their mutual interest in Pollock, and became "painting buddies."

The work of both artists changed following a meeting in New York with artist Helen Frankenthaler, who impressed them with her stain paintings. "Frankenthaler showed us a way ... to think about, and use color," Noland recalls. Upon their return to Washington, Louis and Noland worked together on approaches to staining with color directly on raw canvas, and then proceeded to apply the technique to their own creations.

Noland and Louis formed the nucleus of what became known as the Washington Color School. Rather than adopting the density and gestural style of the Abstract Expressionists, the Color Field group focused on direct application of paint to canvas, in order to emphasize the primary role of color. The resulting images, underscoring the pure emotive power of color, were characterized by vivid, clear hues and openness of design.

"I wanted color to be the origin of the painting," Noland later recalled. "I wanted to make color the generating force." By the mid-1960s, Noland's works, in group exhibitions in Washington and New York, began to include his first efforts at circle paintings. They featured a centered circle enlivened with washes of color surrounded by a good deal of raw canvas, within a square format. In these works, the dynamic qualities of the circle contrast with the static nature of the square. Over a five-year period, Noland created some 175 circle works.

By the late 1950s Noland's images had matured into "targets" - rather pristine geometric circles, represented in the show by "Luster," 1958, from the collection of Cornelia and Meredith Long, dedicated champions of the artist's work, and "Half," 1959. With their bands of color of varying widths moving outward from the center of the canvas, these paintings convey a colorful dynamism that has become a trademark of the artist's oeuvre.

Pure color is featured in "Eyre," 1962, the largest circle canvas on view, measuring a substantial 94 x 94 inches. This "bull's-eye" canvas is memorable. An exhibition of the artist's first circle canvases at French & Co gallery, New York, in 1959 caused a stir and put Noland on the art-world map.

In 1964 Noland was the featured artist in the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Bienale. He has been the subject of over 100 one-person shows at museums and galleries, and of retrospectives at the Guggenheim and Jewish Museums.

In 1962, after moving from Washington to Manhattan, Noland began to try variations on his second significant series, "Chevrons," influenced by Mondrian and Boltowsky, and later "Diamonds."

In the rigorously structured, symmetrical "Chevron" compositions, colorful V-shaped bands descend from the top, centered in a square format. Standout examples on view range from "3 by 3," 1963, to "Untitled," 1965, each sizable canvas featuring bold colors in precisely applied acrylic.

Culminating a search for a painting place outside New York City, in 1963 Noland purchased Robert Frost's old farm in South Shaftsbury, VT, not far from friends and colleagues at art-oriented Bennington College. The artist later moved to North Bennington and, most recently, to mid-coastal Maine, where he now lives with his wife, Paige Rense, Editor-in-Chief of Architectural Digest.

While continuing to work on diamond-shaped paintings, in the late 1960s Noland began exploring horizontal striped canvases, with visually rewarding results. Among the ambitious stripe works in the show are two from the MFA's collection, "Streak," 1968, and "Hush," 1969. They are stunningly mural-sized in dimensions - 313/8 by 1513/8 and 6 by 199 inches respectively, giving free rein to the artist's interest in graduations and orchestrations of color. "It's all color and surface, that's all," Noland once remarked.

In the 1980s Noland revisited an earlier format with a series of "Rough Chevrons," characterized by more vertical compositions. He next tried some works with a more vertical format, the so-called "Plaid" series of the early 1990s. These compositions are characterized by crisscrossing and overlapping horizontal and vertical bands.

For his "New Circle" pictures of the late 1990s, Noland returned to the motif that brought him to wide public attention, but this time in smaller sizes and with more varied paint textures and a more complex color vocabulary. Utilizing diverse paint pigments he revived the cool, disembodied feel of his earlier "targets," but with more nuanced scale, surface and tone. On view are "Upbeat," 1997-98, and "Lasting Eye," 1998, each measuring about 28 by 28 inches.

In his most recent series in the exhibition, "Mysteries," Noland again invokes the large, circle format, but with fresh, new meanings. He achieves different color feelings by varied paint textures that have effects ranging from shiny and iridescent to pearl essence and luminous.

In works such as "Mysteries: Reflection," 2002, and "Mysteries: Rock and Roll," 2002, "Noland dissolved the density of his surfaces, eliciting drama from light and reflection rather than through physical content," observes curator Greene. "It is the optical play of color," she adds, "that once again becomes the vehicle of meaning." A standout is "Rock and Roll," in which, according to Greene. A standout is "Rock and Roll," in which, according to Greene, "Noland establishes afresh his strong ties to the history of Modernism, and no other work by Noland pays so direct an homage to Matisse."

The rewarding exhibition at the MFA, Houston leaves no doubt that although Kenneth Noland continues to return to motifs of earlier days, his new works are different, appealing, superb works of art. Concludes Witkin in her catalog essay, "It is neither oversimplification nor overstatement to say that Noland's paintings of the past decade are like a diary of everything this octogenarian painter has discovered in his working lifetime - about perception, materials, the nature of abstraction itself - embodied in what he calls 'the physical reality of the picture."

At 79, this important Twentieth Century painter is still going strong in the new century. Recently, he began a new series of stripe paintings, which promise to hold new treasures for viewers. It will be interesting to see what other works the master colorist has up his sleeve in the days ahead.

The exhibition catalog contains full-color reproductions and chapters by Greene and Witkin that provide insights into Noland's painting techniques and the meaning and significance of each series of paintings. It is a valuable update on the evolution of the artist's career.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is located at 1001 Bissonet. For information, 713-639-7540 or www.mfah.org.