kenneth noland

Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina. Noland attended the experimental Black Mountain College. In 1948 and 1949 he worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and in the early 1950s met Morris Louis in Washington DC. He became friends with Louis, and they adopted Helen Frankenthaler's “soak-stain” technique of allowing acrylic paint to soak into unprimed canvases. Noland’s 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 bull’s-eyes, using unlikely color combinations. This also led him away from Louis in 1958. Noland pioneered the shaped 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. His shaped canvases are highly irregular and asymmetrical. This results in increasingly complex structures of control and integrity. In 1964 Noland occupied half the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1965 his work was exhibited at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum (New York).