Word: noland
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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...
...later artists as though he were a lesser Picasso; seen through this or that critical filter, it could mean almost anything. The basic données of color-field abstraction, which treated the canvas like an enormous watercolor dyed with mat pigment, were deduced by Frankenthaler, Morris and Noland from the soakings and spatterings of Pollock's work. Along with that went the "theological" view of Pollock as an ideal abstractionist obsessed by flatness, which ignored the fact that there were only four years of his life (1947-51) when he was not making symbolic paintings based...
...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...