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Kenneth Noland

De Brock is pleased to present an exquisite example of Kenneth Noland’s horizontal stripe paintings.

One of the foremost American abstract painters of the twentieth-century, Kenneth Noland’s (1924 – 2010) work is rooted in the potency of color. From the deeply personal and gestural style of Abstract Expressionism, Noland embraced a vocabulary of simple, often geometric shapes — targets, chevrons, diamonds, and stripes — which served as vehicles for his seductive palette and are emblematic of the post-war period.

Noland studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina following World War II with such influential teachers as Josef Albers and Ilya Bolotowsky, who introduced Noland to the expressive possibilities of color. Between 1948 and 1949, Noland lived in Paris where he was profoundly influenced by the palettes of Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, revealing how color could convey mood rather than spatial illusion.

Noland developed his own signature style through the 1950s and adopted the soak-stain technique first used by Helen Frankenthaler, employing thin washes of paint directly upon unprimed canvas to conjure translucent fields of color. By the end of the decade, Noland had begun his first mature body of work, based upon the shape of a circle. These circle or target paintings (1958 – 63) marked a defining moment for Noland, establishing his method of working in series and paving the way for other such significant paintings as the chevrons (1963 – 65), diamonds (1964 – 69), and horizontal stripes (1966 – 70).

Gypsy Wagon (1970) is a magnificent example of the horizontal stripe paintings, which can be found in some of the most important museums around the world. For Noland, this shape allowed for a greater freedom in the expression of color, moving away from the distracting forms of circles or diamonds and presenting color on what critic Michael Fried calls, “more physical grounds”. Noland explains, “These paintings...are the payoff...No graphs; no systems; no modules. No shaped canvas. Above all, no thingness, no objectness. The thing is to get that color down on the thinnest conceivable surface, a surface sliced into the air as if by a razor. It’s all color and surface, that’s all.”

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