Kenneth Noland

Born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1924, Kenneth Noland is best known as a pioneering member of the group termed Color Field painters by art critic Clement Greenburg. As a young man in the 1940s, Noland served in the Air Force as a glider pilot and cryptographer. With the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he studied art at Black Mountain College, near his childhood home. The school developed a reputation as an outpost of European modernist sensibility and a training ground for abstract painters. Noland’s influential teachers included Josef Albers and especially Ilya Bolotowsky. As a student, Noland committed himself to abstract painting, but he recognized a need to break, at least temporarily, from the hard-edged geometric abstraction rooted in the Bauhaus and work by Mondrian that permeated the Black Mountain College.

In 1948 Noland left for a year of study in Paris. He developed an appreciation for the way preeminent colorist Henri Matisse displayed mastery of paint, later commenting “To paint out of Matisse, or to use color, you had to learn how to use the materials."(1) This preoccupation with the formal properties of his chosen materials would become a defining characteristic of Noland’s career. While abroad, Noland also became interested in the emotional and symbolic qualities of Paul Klee’s painting. When Noland returned to the United States, he settled near family and began teaching art in Washington, D.C. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Noland’s work typically incorporated a selection of recognizable symbols – as in this untitled painting – revealing the influence of Klee as well as of early work by Jackson Pollock. At this time, Noland’s technique involved building paint up in thick layers on the ground.