Artist Birthday: Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland was part of the Post Painterly Abstraction group of Color Field artists who sought to distance themselves from the gestural painting of Abstract Expressionism. His epiphany moment came, when, as he put it, he “discovered the center of the canvas.”

Artist birthday for 10 April: Kenneth Noland (1924–2010, United States)

Kenneth Noland was a Color Field artist renowned for his compositions of concentric circles in brilliant color.

Kenneth Noland, Lake, 1959. Oil on unprimed canvas, 300 x 295.2 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. © 2025 Kenneth Noland / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (SI-262novg)

While Noland's circle paintings have been variously dismissed as Minimalism or Pop Art, there are painterly and lyrical components to his work. Like the Color Field works of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Noland did not shy away from brush stroke. Lake is an example of Noland's brilliant variation on his established compositional reliance on concentric circles. Imagining the view of lakes from an airplane, Noland established an implied circle in this radially balance composition. The gestural application of paint is possibly a hangover of the influence of the action painting wing of Abstract Expressionism, although his reference to nature transcends the Abstract Expressionist emphasis purely on process. And speaking of process, this work was executed as a stain painting á la Frankenthaler and Louis, both of whom he met in 1950.

Abstract Expressionism is generally separated into two styles, action painting and color field. Action painting involves energetic brushstroke, splatters of paint, and thick surface build-up. Color field, in its broadest definition, refers to a work consisting of large areas of color.  It is characterized by openness of structure, anonymity of brushstroke, and  an accent on fields of pure color.

Color Field painting  is sometimes called “Post-Painterly Abstraction” to denote that the artists who were part of the style were rejecting the idea of individual brush gesture, the hallmark of action painting of Abstract Expressionism. Hard Edge painting evolved from Color Field, with the emphasis of a total unity of surface with sharply defined forms contrasting with blank canvas avoiding the appearance of figures on a field.

Born in the art colony town of Asheville, North Carolina, Noland studied at nearby Black Mountain College (1946–1948), working with Minimalist Ilya Bolotowsky (1907–1981) and geometric Color Field artist Josef Albers (1888–1976).  After a year in Paris in 1948, he returned to the US, moving to Washington DC in 1949. His paintings at the time reflected the all-over painting abstractions of the European counterpart to Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel. Noland frequently returned to Black Mountain for visits.

In 1950, Noland met Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), an artist who was experimenting with staining raw canvas. He also met the champion of Abstract Expressionism Clement Greenberg (1909–1994). Through them, he became aware of Abstract Expressionism. Noland immediately began experimenting with Frankenthaler's staining style for his own brand of Color Field works, abstract canvases saturated with pure color.

Returning to Washington, Noland encountered a group of painters known as the Washington Color School Painters, among them Morris Louis (1912–1962), who, like Frankenthaler, stained raw canvas with pure color. Noland's first completely unique statements of Color Field lasted from the mid-1950s to about 1962, after he had discovered the center of the canvas as a focal point for his compositions. Ensuing were paintings where the principal image from concentric circles, to chevrons or stripes, were exactly centered on the usually square canvas.