Kenneth Noland (April 10, 1924 – January 5, 2010[1]) was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977 he was honored by a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. and the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio in 1978. In 2006 Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Noland
“Kenneth Noland was one of the most influential American abstract painters of the three decades that followed the Second World War — which is as much as to say that his influence was global.”
“Certainly no full understanding of abstract painting from the 1950s to the 1970s is possible without acknowledging Noland’s central and formative position.”
“I wanted to have color be the origin of the painting,” he once said. “I was trying to neutralize the layout, the shape, the composition. I wanted to make color the generating force.”
At the present moment his work does not receive the attention it deserves. Nevertheless, his ravishing, classical paintings lift the spirit, and will eventually be acclaimed again. He will surely be recognized as the key central figure of post-Abstract Expressionist painting.”
(The Times UK. January 9, 2010)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6981167.ece
Look here for a really nice slide show of Nolan’s targets. http://www.kennethnoland.com/
I saw this “Target” tractor-trailer truck behind a barbed wire fence and thought of Nolan’s “Target” paintings. If you don’t know or as yet appreciate his abstract paintings, you might want to look at the slide show linked above. Thanks.
G
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