Kenneth Noland

Lawrence Rubin Gallery, New York
The Estate of Mrs. Algur H. Meadows, Dallas
Christie's, New York, November, 11, 1982, Lot 153
Marisa del Re Gallery Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, The Meadows Collection, June - July 1974
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, May - June 1977, cat. no. 12, p. 56, illustrated in color

Kenworth Moffett, Kenneth Noland, New York, 1977, no. 77, illustrated in color

In the 1950s, an instrumental friendship and admiration ensued between Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis while they were both working in the relative isolation of Washington, D.C. Clement Greenberg, the critic and future herald of the movement that was to become known as Color Field Painting, arranged for them to visit the studio of the maverick, Helen Frankenthaler, and together they visited her studio in the spring of 1953. Upon seeing Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea (1952), they realized that here, as Morris Louis noted, was "a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.'' Louis and Noland individually explored Frankenthaler's revolutionary methods of staining on canvas, to different aesthetic ends, quickly resulting in Louis' archetypal "Veil" paintings and Noland's "Circle" paintings. Although Louis died tragically in September 1962, just as his body of work was at the door of international recognition, Noland gained recognition for his art at a similar accelerated rate. Greenberg penned his infamous article "Louis and Noland'' in Art International May 1960, which proved to be pivotal in both artists' establishment of widespread recognition. In the essay, Greenberg asserted that Noland and Louis were the only new artists whose works sustained the quality and originality not before seen since the most successful artists from the first wave of Abstract Expressionists.

In the Circle paintings, often also referred to as Targets, Noland established his most celebrated series of works, a motif to which he would return in his later paintings. Giving primacy to color, Noland ultimately flattened his composition, eschewing the traditional illusionism of easel painting with as much force as Robert Delaunay, the modernist painter who first focused on adapting the Cubist style to serve color. Like Delaunay, Noland was drawn to the symmetry and expansiveness of circular forms as a congenial vehicle for color and often chose the circle as the organizing principle of a composition. Expanding upon Delaunay's schema, Noland was able to experiment with the balance of concentric colored forms and the juxtaposition between the varied circular components. By staining the pigment directly onto a raw canvas, Noland purely and intimately unified the color and the surface. In a seminal text on Noland from 1993, William C. Agee, in discussing the Circle paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, noted that the "resolution of these paintings, their clarity and articulation, is such that they mark a high moment in the history of modern painting... The paintings, with evocative titles such as Heat, Plunge, and Beginning, were filled with intense color that seemed to radiate from a format of rough concentric circles. Their impact was dramatic... Today, these paintings are as fresh and powerful as they were when they were first exhibited... They are surely a high moment in post-1945 art and their historical importance and level of accomplishment are such that they compel us to look closely at them once again.'' (Exh. Cat., Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Kenneth Noland: The Circle Paintings, 1956-1963, 1993).

Noland's Circle paintings, such as the present Round, seem to radiate out from the canvas, pulsating with light as the warm and cool tones activate in one another's presence – in this case, the warm red center vies with the cool blue bands. Noland further stimulates the surface with the dynamic, irregularly painted outer circle, implying motion within the flattened static space. In Round, as in many of his most successful paintings from this series, Noland achieves an absolute balance of color and form within a vibrant composition that is teeming with self-sustaining energy.