Word: noland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...retrospective show of paintings by Kenneth Noland-their stripes and chevrons wedged uneasily into the conchoid spaces of New York's Guggenheim Museum-provides a dismaying lesson in how critical fashions change. It is not very long since No-land's work, along with the stains of Morris Louis and the peach-bloom surfaces of Jules Olitski, was assigned an authority close to that of Holy Writ. This, formalist criticism said over and over again in the '60s, is the way painting must go: it is the inevitable future...
...Only an art of constant formal self-criticism," wrote the critic Michael Fried in a preface to an earlier Noland museum retrospective in 1965, "can bear or embody or communicate more than trivial meaning." Noland's work was self-critical in the extreme. It seemed made for-not to say, made by-the narrow and authoritarian standards of "tough" formalism, as issued to the world by Clement Greenberg and his epigones in Artforum. Nothing considered inessential to painting remained in it. No representation or symbolism. No drawing except of the most rudimentary and geometrical kind: circles, squares, chevrons, straight...
...wanted to have color be the origin of the painting," Noland said in 1969. "I was trying to neutralize the layout, the shape, the composition in order to get at the color. Pollock had indicated getting away from drawing. I wanted to make color the generating force." On this proposition, and the paintings that flowed from it, a palace of exegesis was raised-an academy so pervasive hi its effect during the '60s that hundreds of younger artists from New York to Sydney could see no way past it. The polished assurance of Noland's style, its clear...
Pulsating With Light. Noland in the '60s was undeniably an accomplished colorist. In the best of his target paintings, like Virginia Site, 1959, he could set a splashy white rim whirling around concentric circles of black, yellow and blue with an airy energy that few American painters (and no European ones at the time) could equal. Like gigantic watercolors-which in effect they are-Noland's targets and chevrons bloom and pulsate with light. They offer a pure, uncluttered hedonism to the eye. But that is all they do offer. The more recent work, the plaid paintings...
...Noland," writes Curator Diane Waldman in her catalogue essay, "ranks with Delacroix and the impressionists among the great color painters of the modern era. Unquestionably heir to Matisse and Klee in the realm of color expression, he is to his generation what they were to their own." This litany might have read better ten years ago than it does today; it is incantatory rubbish. Delacroix was not a "color painter" in any sense of the word that can be applied to Noland. He was a superb colorist whose art was occupied with matters other than the disinterested play of color...