Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images The artist Kenneth Noland in his studio surrounded by his geometric paintings, 1960s. Slide ShowKenneth Noland, who painted some of the great emblems of the postwar American abstract style called Color Field painting, died Tuesday at his home in Port Clyde, Me. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest. He was 85.
Born in Asheville, N.C., in 1924, he studied art at the adventurous, short-lived Black Mountain College (conveniently located just outside his hometown) from 1946 to 1948, was inspired by the stain-painting technique that Helen Frankenthaler deducted from Jackson Pollock’s drips, and had his first exhibition in New York in 1957, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
Mr. Noland’s signature motif was a radiant target made of rings of pure color strained directly on raw canvas, with that canvas contributing a wonderful sense of breathing room between each band of color. The power of the colors, their often discordant interaction and the expanding and contracting rhythms of the bands of paint and the raw canvas, could be stunningly direct and vibrant. Mr. Noland’s work was championed by Clement Greenberg and other formalist art critics, but in the beginning it was also greatly admired by more wide-ranging critics, including Donald Judd.
His survivors include his daughter, Cady Noland, the Conceptual sculptor whose work has been widely influential since she emerged in the late 1980s.
A slide show of images of Mr. Noland’s work can be found here.
In the 1960s, Color Field painting vied for dominance with Pop Art and Minimalism, ultimately losing the contest in terms of both critical stature and market share. Perhaps to his detriment, Mr. Noland was ardently loyal to his formalist principles. He bent his bands of color into bold chevron arrangements, and more delicate parallel lines and plaids, while also experimenting with shaped canvases. He sometimes achieved a light radiance that had something of Rococo. A current exhibition at the Leslie Feely Gallery on East 68th Street of shaped, almost shard-like works from the 1980s attests to his persistence and his fascination with painting’s dual existence as optical illusion and as object. In his complete reliance on color, scale and composition, Mr. Noland may have hewed closest longest to Frank Stella’s famous dictum “what you see is what you see.” When he was good, he was excellent.
Read the full obituary from The Times.
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