American, b. 1924, Asheville, North Dakota — d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine
Lived and worked in Washington, DC, New York City, Vermont and Maine

As a student at Black Mountain College, Kenneth Noland met artist Helen Frankenthaler. Through her he became aware of Abstract Expressionism. This encounter was critical in the development of Noland’s artistic style; as he began experimenting with Frankenthaler’s pouring and staining techniques. This experimentation became the impetus for his own color field paintings.

Noland explored the relationships between contrasting or complementary colors; painted in thin yet opaque layers, each tone reveals its particular characteristic weight, density, and transparency. As a member of the hard-edged abstraction Color Field contingent, Noland was interested in removing all texture, gesture, and emotional content from his paintings. He even executed some works on shaped canvases that were filled by their compositions from edge to edge, leaving no marginal space for suggestions of depth or background.

Noland met the group of artists known as the Washington Color School Painters while teaching night classes at the noted Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in Washington DC. Clement Greenberg, influential art critic, early became a champion of his art. The late art critic of The New York Times Hilton Kramer wrote of Noland’s work, An art of this sort places a very heavy burden on the artist’s sensibility for color, of course — on his ability to come up, again and again, with fresh and striking combinations that both capture and sustain our attention, and provide the requisite pleasures… Mr. Noland is unquestionably a master.

Kenneth Noland was honored with retrospective exhibitions at both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, and jointly at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC. His artworks are collected internationally.