"Noland should go down as one of the greatest painters of the last half century. No one has explored pure color and geometry more brilliantly than he. No one has achieved such a radiant, weightless reality."
F or over half a century, Kenneth Noland pushed a trailblazing practice in contemporary art, constantly seeking to evolve and reconceptualize his own oeuvre in pursuit of new chromatic horizons. The present work, an example of the artist’s shaped canvases, represents one such deliberate development in his career. Featuring dramatic juxtapositions of hue and value framed in a startling asymmetrical polygon, Elong adds a newly dimensional aspect to Noland’s endless explorations of the pictorial plane. Noland first explored the tantalizing visual potential of the shaped canvas in 1975 as a way to simultaneously convey a modernist flatness and a captivating perspectival illusionism. As suggested by its title, the white arrowlike shape of Elong is contoured on top and bottom by a pristine pair of black and purple bars, resulting in a sleek, aerodynamic composition that exudes a thrilling sense of movement alongside a measured minimalistic coolness.
"While accepting the challenges of the greatest achievements of the past, [Noland] has called into question all conventions for the sake of color. . . . In precisely this way, he has gained conscious control of all the coordinates of painting: composition, shape, size, proportion, color, paint quality. He may temporarily hold certain of these coordinates constant, but nothing is taken for granted or assumed—all limitations are self-limitations and positively expressive."
Elong hails from the collection of renowned critic, curator, and Noland’s longtime friend Kenworth Moffett. In addition to holding an art history professorship at Wellesley College, he became the first curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. From 1989 to 1997, Moffett served as the director of the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Florida (now the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale) and subsequently helped found MoCAD (now the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver) in 1998. An early supporter of Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painters alongside Clement Greenberg, Moffett organized and supervised more than one hundred exhibitions during his lifetime. His 1977 monograph Kenneth Noland remains one of the most crucial pieces of literature to date on the artist’s early and mid-career development. Poised at the nexus of Noland’s social circles and privy to his cerebral musings on color, shape and line, Moffett was uniquely positioned to visualize the complex artistic network that Noland developed and synthesized into his own work over the years—which ranged from tributes to Fauvist art and Paul Klee, to the contemporary influence of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.
Elong serves as testament to Noland’s career-long ability to use color, line, and shape to create resounding works of abstraction that are instantly recognizable and visually stimulating. An inspiring memento of an admirable artist-patron relationship, Elong serves as not only an example of an exceptional work by Noland, but also an enduring symbol of his friendship with Moffett and their respect for one another.
