Home | Chronology | Appreciating Noland | Contact Us

APPRECIATING NOLAND

STRIPES

ALTHOUGH HIS TARGETS and "chevrons" proclaimed Noland to be a major artist, if anything the "stripes" (1967-70) constituted a grand and classical culmination of his development in the '60s. Superficially the most passive of Noland's formats, this magnificent series abounds in masterpieces.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Noland didn't use parallel bands of color until he'd found formats to activate them. Parallel bands were common in '60s painting, but painters had usually used them in vertical configurations. Horizontal, bands seemed apt to evoke landscape, breaking apart at a horizon implied by a horizontal edge. Upright bands seemed more likely to stand side by side like pickets in a fence.

Noland didn't want the effect of a fence. For him the upright configuration concealed a deeper problem than the threat of recalling a landscape. Upright bands and stripes suggest thin sculptural shapes - pickets, indeed, which seem applied before or upon a background. By this time Noland was committed to merging figure and ground in an ambiguous, emblematic presence. He chose a horizontal alignment.

Noland's "stripe" formats are as brilliant as they are simple. By extending shape laterally, horizontal bands take advantage of the tendency of binocular eyesight to scan from side to side, and take corresponding advantage of the available width of walls in relation to height. In offering an uninterrupted horizontal surface to eyesight, the horizontal bands reinforce color continuity and repress shape and solidity. The optical replaces the sculptural.

In these paintings the suggestion of landscape isn't overcome so much as it's raised to a common area of perception. The stripes don't resemble landscape, yet one responds to them as one might to an extensive view.

The "stripes" are typically much wider than tall, often in the proportion of 10:1 or more. The units which compose them range from narrow stripes or lines to wide bands or panels. Any number of bands can be stacked, and extension can vary in proportion. Many "stripes" are no more than a few inches tall and five or six feet wide; others are colored giants eight or nine feet high and twenty or more feet wide.

The "stripes" are true color compositions based on a highly developed colour vocabulary. Varied band widths; emphasized bottom edges; fringes of bands sandwiching a central panel; close values; pale, muted colors and deep greys - all provide variety and infinite complexity. Widths, color choices, and intervals between the two are often repeated, sometimes in chord-like clusters across the entire picture surface. These repetitions compose with color after the fashion of music. Tension and movement is provided by repetition and interval magnified by measured lateral extension. As Noland puts it:

The ends or sides of the horizontal paintings as well as the tops and bottoms are in accord with the length and width of the total bunch of colors in a successful picture. The ends don't chop off the bands; the bands don't extend beyond the ends. The threshold between the depicted symmetry and the actual symmetry of the object makes room for illusion and expression. This is true for all painting - between the subject of nature painting (still life, landscape, portrait, etc.) and the picture shape. After all, subject matter never is the ultimate content of a work of art. The artistic content overrides. Cézanne is the supreme master of this.