Kenneth Noland valuation
Colour field painter of targets, chevrons and stripes, who let the shape of the canvas follow the colour.
Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and after war service studied at Black Mountain College on the GI Bill, under Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers, and then in Paris with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine.
What a work by Kenneth Noland is worth
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Bio
Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and after war service studied at Black Mountain College on the GI Bill, under Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers, and then in Paris with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. In Washington in the early 1950s he befriended Morris Louis, and in 1953 the two visited Helen Frankenthaler's studio in New York with Clement Greenberg and saw Mountains and Sea, painted by staining thinned paint into raw canvas. Both men took up the method. Noland's targets of concentric rings, from the late 1950s, were followed by chevrons, by long horizontal stripe paintings and, in the 1970s, by irregular shaped canvases, each format a way of letting colour carry the whole picture without drawing or gesture. He showed in the United States pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and the Guggenheim gave him a retrospective in 1977.
The paintings are acrylic on canvas, much of it unprimed, so the stained colour sits in the weave and cannot be cleaned or retouched without showing; grime, staining and foxing on the bare canvas are the commonest condition problems, and tacking edges should be checked on a canvas that has been restretched. Beside the paintings there are works on paper, including works in handmade paper, and prints.
Black Mountain, Washington and the targets
Greenberg included him in Post Painterly Abstraction, the exhibition he organised at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, and the label colour field has stayed with him since.
The sculptor and installation artist Cady Noland is his daughter.
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