A son of Harry Caswell Noland (1896–1975), apathologist, and his wife, Bessie (1897–1980), Kenneth Clifton Noland was born inAsheville,North Carolina. He had four siblings: David, Bill, Neil, and Harry Jr.[1][2]
Noland enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1942 after completing high school. As a veteran ofWorld War II, he took advantage of theG.I. Bill to study art atBlack Mountain College in his home state of North Carolina.[3] At Black Mountain, where two of his brothers also studied art, Noland studied withIlya Bolotowsky, a professor who introduced him toneoplasticism and the work ofPiet Mondrian. Noland also studiedBauhaus theory and color there underJosef Albers[4] and became interested inPaul Klee—specifically Klee's sensitivity to color.[5]
In 1948 and 1949 Noland worked withOssip Zadkine inParis, and had his first exhibition of his paintings there in 1949. After returning to the U.S., he taught inWashington, D.C., atCatholic University (1951–1960) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts.[6]
In the early 1950s, Noland metMorris Louis in D.C. while teaching night classes at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts. He became friends with Louis, and after being introduced byClement Greenberg toHelen Frankenthaler and seeing her new paintings at her studio in New York City in 1953, he and Louis adopted her "soak-stain" technique of allowing thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases.[7]
Most of Noland's paintings fall into one of four groups: circles (or targets),chevrons, stripes, andshaped canvases. His preoccupation with the relationship of the image to the containing edge of the picture led him to a series of studies of concentric rings or bullseyes, commonly called targets, which, like the one reproduced here—Beginning (1958)—used unlikely color combinations. This also led Noland away from Louis in 1958.
In 1964, he was included in the exhibitionPost-Painterly Abstraction curated byClement Greenberg,[8] which traveled the country and helped to firmly establishcolor field painting as an important new movement in contemporary art of the 1960s. Noland pioneered theshaped canvas, initially with a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical diamonds or chevrons. In these paintings, the edges of the canvas become as structurally important as the center.
During the 1970s and 1980s hisshaped canvases were highly irregular and asymmetrical. These resulted in increasingly complex structures of highly sophisticated and controlled color and surface integrity.
Instead of painting the canvas with a brush, Noland's style was to stain the canvas with color. This idea sought to remove the artist through brushstrokes. This made the piece about the art, not the artist. He emphasized spatial relationships in his work by leaving unstained, bare canvas as a contrast against the colors used throughout his paintings. Noland used simplified abstraction so the design would not detract from the use of color.[9]
Cornelia Langer, a daughter of the U.S. senator fromNorth DakotaWilliam Langer. They married in 1950 and divorced in 1957.[13] They had three children: daughtersCady and Lyndon (a.k.a. Lyn) and a son, William.[14][15]
Stephanie Gordon, a psychologist, lived with Noland from November 1964 until June 1970. They married in April 1967 and divorced in June 1970.[16]
Peggy L. Schiffer, an art historian. They married circa 1970, and had a son, Samuel Jesse.[17][18][19][20]
Noland had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris in 1948. In 1957, he had his first New York solo exhibition at theTibor de Nagy Gallery.[25] In 1964, Noland occupied half the American pavilion at theVenice Biennale.[26] In 1965, his work was exhibited at theWashington Gallery of Modern Art and theJewish Museum (New York). Noland's final solo exhibition,Kenneth Noland Shaped Paintings 1981–82, opened on October 29, 2009, at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on East 68th Street in New York City and was scheduled to close on January 9, 2010 (though the closing date was later extended to January 16).[27] In 2010, Noland was honored with a solo presentation of his work at theGuggenheim Museum, entitledKenneth Noland, 1924–2010: A Tribute.[26] In addition, his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a range of international institutions, including theMuseo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (1983);Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain (1985);Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2004);Tate, Liverpool (2006); andButler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio (1986 and 2007).
^Parents' names and siblings from ancestry.com, found in 1930 North Carolina federal census as well as the North Carolina birth register listing of Noland's birth. Records accessed on 7 January 2010.
^Noland's younger brother Neil (born 1927) became a sculptor, and like his brother Kenneth, he studied art atBlack Mountain College, as did Noland's brother Harry.
^Obituaries state Noland was drafted in 1942 and served until 1946. An official enlistment record, however, states Noland, then 20, joined the Army Air Corps Reserves as a private at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi, on 24 May 1944. The record was accessed on ancestry.com on 7 January 2010.
^Writer, artist, and arts administrator Michael Fallon has claimed that his maternal grandmother, Billie Ruth Sinclair (7 July 1925 - 2008), was Noland's first wife and that their brief marriage took place in Asheville, North Carolina in the mid-1940s. He wrote about the marriage in a 2007 essay on the website of Minnesota Artists (mnartists.org), a joint project of theWalker Arts Center and theMcKnight Foundation."Mn Artists | Arts Writing from Mn, Beyond Mn". Archived fromthe original on September 28, 2011. RetrievedJanuary 7, 2010. A search on ancestry.com on 7 January 2010 revealed Kenneth C. Noland's Army Air Corps enlistment record, dated 24 May 1944, at Keesler Field, Biloxi, Mississippi, in which Pvt. Noland declares his marital status as "married", though the name of his wife is not listed.
^Noland's children have followed in their father's artistic footsteps.Cady Noland (born 1956) is an installation artist andConceptual sculptor, Lyn Noland is a sculptor andEmmy award-winning camerawoman, and William Langer Noland is a photographer and sculptor and serves as an associate professor of the visual arts atDuke University.
^Sustendal, Diane (1984-10-07)."Men's Style: Patterned Sweaters".The New York Times: 105. Retrieved2022-04-04.Alexander Julian, long an admirer of Kenneth Noland's work, interpreted the artist's graphic linear patterns into more than one of his sweaters.
^"Artist Info".National Gallery of Art. RetrievedJune 9, 2021.
"Kenneth Noland."Contemporary Artists, 4th ed. St. James Press, 1996. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.
"Kenneth Noland: Color, Format and Abstract Art." Interview by Diane Waldman (1977), in:Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by K. Stiles and P. Selz, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 94–98.
"Kenneth Noland."Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.
