Word: noland
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...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...
...only weak summer show is the contemporary exhibit which consists of works by enticing names like Mark Rothko, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Motherwell. These paintings are shown in a sick yellow light made uneven by baby spots. This would be disastrous for any paintings but especially these--most rely heavily on color impact. The only painting which looks decent Is one of Clyfford Still's; he was after horrifying color for his craggy paintings anyway...
...Royal Academy School in London and later as a studio assistant to Henry Moore, Caro had been trained in a monolithic approach to sculpture. His work reflected it: scarred, blimpish nudes writhing lumpily on their pedestals. Then, in 1959, Caro made his first trip to America. He met Kenneth Noland, talked to Greenberg and saw Smith's welded-steel sculptures. He was 35 and, as he recalls, "waiting to be blown over...
...various followers. A fine recent example is the catalogue to the exhibition staged by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and tendentiously titled The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960 to 1970. With preposterous promotional excess, the catalogue informs readers that what artists like Olitski, Noland, Louis and Friedel Dzubas produced in America in the 1960s can be compared in quality with the work of the impressionists between 1865 and 1875, and Braque, Picasso and Matisse between...