Word: noland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last month a federal judge in Indianapolis listened to arguments over whether four 6th century mosaics bought in Switzerland by an American art dealer had actually been stolen from Cyprus after the island was invaded by Turkish soldiers in 1974. Last week Judge James E. Noland announced his decision: the Byzantine religious works that suburban Indianapolis art dealer Peg Goldberg purchased for $1.2 million last year and tried to sell to the Getty Museum in California, are legally the property of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Cyprus and must be returned...
...Noland accepted the argument of the church and the Greek Cypriot government that the works had been stripped from a small village church on the Turkish- controlled side of the island and illegally offered for sale on the international art market. Said Archbishop Chrysostomos of the Cyprus Church: "This just decision by the American court will help end the illegal marketing of looted archaeological items worldwide." Museum directors expect the decision to set an important precedent for regulating the antiquities market...
When the critic Clement Greenberg sent Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland round to see Mountains and Sea in Frankenthaler's studio, they were astonished. "It was as if Morris had been waiting all his life for this information," Noland would say later. What they saw was a way to convey the weightless bloom of color without any apparent thickness of paint: light without texture. (Maybe they could have seen it earlier by looking at Turner's watercolors, but never mind: American taste ran to watercolors the size of Guernica.) Though practically no one now buys the '60s' doctrinaire readings...
Unlike Louis and Noland, Frankenthaler never worked in series; each picture was, to some degree, a new start. The pleasure was in the freshness. What is the central shape so comfily enclosed within the framing edges of Buddha's Court, 1964? A fat little figure, but vaguely so; the Rothko-like bars of color could indicate someone squatting in the lotus position. Yet it cannot have started from a figure: it is the sensation of calm presence that comes off the blues, in their association with tan and brown edges, that generates the "subject" of the painting. You still feel...
Thus emerged the chief form of American museum art in the early '60s: The Watercolor That Ate the Art World. Of course, one could hardly come right out with it and say the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (quite apart from the thousands of yards of lyric acrylic on unprimed duck done by their many forgotten imitators) were basically huge watercolors. But there was little in the soak-stain methods of color-field painting that did not seek and repeat watercolor effects. The big difference lay in the size, the curtness and (sometimes) the grandeur...