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APPRECIATING NOLAND

FORMAT

There has always been a play between the actual symmetry of the picture shape (square, horizontal, diamond, shape, etc.) and the symmetry of layout, which opens the depicted forms to the use of color -- to sound or harmonize in an expressive way.       -- Kenneth Noland

 

COLOR BY ITSELF can't make great paintings. It must be organized. In his ability to reconceive pictorial organization, Noland revealed a unique genius. This is the side of art that belongs to drawing and design. Because it is more readily analyzed than color, the discussion of it tends to to take up more space, as it does below. But despite the space accorded, remember that formats in Noland are designed to serve and support painting with color.

Noland virtually took illustration out of art, leaving behind what Bernard Berenson has called decoration. If illustration is the literary, storytelling side of art; decoration is the purely visual. In Aesthetics and History Berenson observed: "there is no room for the ugly in art as decoration, but only in art as illustration. Decoration gives its own value to objects regardless of what they are in actuality."

The mainstream of modernism has progressively abandoned illustration in favour of decoration. This process involved simplifying or "abstracting" what Roger Fry and others have called "natural forms." This abstracting tendency was attached to cubism, especially as practiced by artists like Picasso and even Mondrian.

When the center of art shifted to New York in the '40s, abstracting cubism was inherited from the School of Paris. But by the 1950s, it was under pressure from many American artists. Pollock, Rothko, Louis, Gottlieb, Motherwell -- all made abstract paintings which had a vague, symbolic association in their imagery.

So did Noland's early "circles," which were surrounded by painterly penumbras. Realizing that the targets could stand on their own as simple, geometric layouts, by 1960 he'd turned to unadorned unsymbolic circles. These concentric circles were just circles; every vestige of representation or allusion in the drawing of them had been expunged. Symbolic allusiveness was taken over by color.

This happened about the same time that Jasper Johns painted his famous "targets." Although these were superficially similar to Noland's "circles," they served different ends as Johns' subsequent development makes plain. Johns' is an art of painterly illustration, a popular appendage to the main stream. This phenomenon isn't new. No matter how far from nature this illustrative art ventures, some aspect of the literary remains attached. Attachments to the mainstream of modern art have always been accompanied by illustration. This leads to an art that can be explained and understood, where appreciation occurs at a low level. No amount of understanding suffices in the case of Noland's art. It addresses itself exclusively to appreciation.

Before this century, geometry was implicit in pictorial design. In the 20th century it has become more and more explicit.

Before 1950, Russian constructivists and various members of the Bauhaus used it the most strictly. Of these, Piet Mondrian's paintings of the 1930s and '40s were the most prominent and influential. Mondrian's geometry serves different ends than Noland's. In his later paintings primary colors locate positions and rhythms in a geometric layout. Mondrian's color doesn't vary from picture from picture to picture; his layout does. Noland's layout doesn't vary from picture to picture; his color does. Noland uses color to infuse feeling into the what would be otherwise bland, geometric compositions.

Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko were innovators in the realm of geometric abstraction from the generation after Mondrian. Both used color in large, resonant areas. Their art moved geometry into a scale that carried color sensation more effectively.

But both "abstracted" from nature more than Noland did. This is suggested by even the title of Newman's "Stations of the Cross" series, while Rothko's development and practice demonstrate a similar symbolic interest. There's nothing inherently wrong with this -- Adolph Gottlieb and Morris Louis in their less geometric ways also used symbolic images -- but it may have restricted Newman and Rothko. Certainly for artists of the '60s this kind of abstracting posed as many problems as it solved.

Noland's art doesn't abstract from nature any more than does Bach's music. Because of this, it can use color with extraordinary freedom. The feeling in Noland's art comes from relations among colors as much as from their sheer, optical resonance.

The characteristic format of modern painting has gradually moved away from an illusory "window" to something more immediate, a picture that's seen against the wall as an emblematic panel. This kind of picture is more of an object than the traditional easel picture. Its objective presence was first intimated in cubist collage. From there it proceeded through Matisse, Mondrian, Pollock, Louis, Noland, and Olitski to the recent deep relief painting of Lawrence Poons, Susan Roth, John Griefen, and James Walsh. Despite its declarative presence, it's more emblematic than sculptural and developed from the emblematic character of imagery in cubist painting. Throughout its development it has nodded in the direction of bas relief, but only to acknowledge a common physicality.

In the '60s and '70s its foremost innovators were Noland and Jules Olitski. In Olitski's hand, the panel inclined to monochromatic displays of texture or atmospheric colour in narrow rectangular formats. This narrow format was common in the new panel picture. Because it pushed the sides of the painting close to the center it held the picture interior flat, preventing it from dissolving into flaccid illusion.

Noland's art was instrumental in the development of this new picture. His first series placed an emblematic image -- usually a group of concentric circles -- at the center of a square canvas. In his subsequent "chevrons" the emblematic image appeared to be intersected by the picture rectangle. By the time of the "stripes" and "needle diamonds" the emblematic image had become the picture itself.

From Picasso to Pollock picture shapes had been passive containers for an accumulation of pictorial units. Their paintings emphasized emblematic flatness within relatively traditional confines. Noland turned the tables, making this accumulation of units dictate the shape of the picture itself. After the "chevrons" picture shape became an active element in his pictorial expression.

By taking variety away from internal shapes, Noland made color take its place. This called for a new kind of composition. Internal shape became a matter of widths, lengths, and interactions. In many cases these determined the overall picture shape.

This emblematic panel format was reinforced by a new sense of scale. Geometric abstraction before Noland was in the scale of easel painting. Because of this it carried with it an aroma of depiction. Scale in Noland's painting is felt in relation to the human body rather than to the easel's imaginary window. A size of about 6 ft. to 7 ft. in one dimension is common, though by no means constant. This scale relates to the height or outstretched arm reach of a person and reinforces an analogous presence. One encounters the new panel picture as a presence against the wall rather than an opening into it.

The fundamental unit of Noland's formats is the band or stripe -- often a reflection of the picture shape itself. This unit is an anonymous carrier for color and paint. Noland's discovery of it in the late '50s was instrumental in his breakthrough.

The band has the virtues of continuity and anonymity. Continuity, in the form of attenuation and elongation, makes the shape less sculptural - more of a line and less of a shape. As a result it appears as a color area within the surface rather than an object applied to it. Anonymity means the shape avoids representation and evocation.

Repeated bands and symmetrical layouts stabilize Noland's paintings. There's a great difference between Noland's art and that of a great earlier colorist like Matisse. Matisse avoided symmetry and repeated pattern. He backed away from it out of fear, I suspect, of surrendering pictorial tension to simple decoration. Noland met the problem head on, adding unexpected tension to symmetry and decorative repetition. This tension often took the form of implied directional movement through a measured sequence of colours. To use a phase of Clement Greenberg's, Noland "used the decorative against itself."