Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland (b. 1924, Asheville, North Carolina; d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine) was one of the foremost figures of the American post-war abstract art scene. Thanks to the G.I. bill, Noland attended Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1948 and studied with Josef Albers and Ilya Bolotowsky. There, Noland was introduced to Bauhaus and Neoplasticism, both of which informed the artist’s commitment to shape and color throughout his career. Noland was heavily influenced by the color theory of Wassily Kandinsky and the formal language of Piet Mondrian’s geometric compositions. Along with his contemporaries Morris Louis and Gene Davis, Noland helped establish the Washington Color School, a group of artists committed to further developing ideas of abstraction first promoted through the Color Field painting of the 1940s and 50s. Artists of the Washington Color School, including Noland, focused heavily on large swaths of solid color and hard-edged painting techniques. Noland’s work has been collected by a number of American and European art institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Kunsthaus Zürich; Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.