Kenneth Noland

In 1977, he was honored with a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C, and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in 1978. In 2006, Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London.

• Name — Kenneth Noland • Born — 10 April 1924 • Birthplace — Asheville, North Carolina, U.S. • Died — 5 January 2010 • Place of death — Port Clyde, Maine, U.S. • Known for — Abstract art • Training — Black Mountain College • Movement — color field painting • Children — 4, including Cady

A son of Harry Caswell Noland (1896–1975), a pathologist, and his wife, Bessie (1897–1980), Kenneth Clifton Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He had four siblings: David, Bill, Neil, and Harry Jr. Noland enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1942 after completing high school. As a veteran of World War II, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study art at Black Mountain College in his home state of North Carolina. At Black Mountain, where two of his brothers also studied art, Noland studied with Ilya Bolotowsky, a professor who introduced him to neoplasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian. Noland also studied Bauhaus theory and color there under Josef Albers and became interested in Paul Klee—specifically Klee's sensitivity to color.

• Illustration — Beginning (1958) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden In 1948 and 1949 Noland worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and had his first exhibition of his paintings there in 1949. After returning to the U.S., he taught in Washington, D.C., at Catholic University (1951–1960) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In the early 1950s, Noland met Morris Louis in D.C. while teaching night classes at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts. He became friends with Louis, and after being introduced by Clement Greenberg to Helen Frankenthaler and seeing her new paintings at her studio in New York City in 1953, he and Louis adopted her "soak-stain" technique of allowing thinned paint to soak into unprimed canvases. Most of Noland's paintings fall into one of four groups: circles (or targets), chevrons, stripes, and shaped canvases. His preoccupation with the relationship of the image to the containing edge of the picture led him to a series of studies of concentric rings or bullseyes, commonly called targets, which, like the one reproduced here—Beginning (1958)—used unlikely color combinations. This also led Noland away from Louis in 1958. In 1964, he was included in the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction curated by Clement Greenberg, which traveled the country and helped to firmly establish color field painting as an important new movement in contemporary art of the 1960s. Noland pioneered the shaped canvas, initially with a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical diamonds or chevrons. In these paintings, the edges of the canvas become as structurally important as the center. During the 1970s and 1980s his shaped canvases were highly irregular and asymmetrical. These resulted in increasingly complex structures of highly sophisticated and controlled color and surface integrity.

Noland was married to: • Cornelia Langer, a daughter of the U.S. senator from North Dakota William Langer. They married in 1950 and divorced in 1957. They had three children: daughters Cady and Lyndon (a.k.a. Lyn) and a son, William. • Stephanie Gordon, a psychologist, lived with Noland from November 1964 until June 1970. They married in April 1967 and divorced in June 1970. • Peggy L. Schiffer, an art historian. They married circa 1970, and had a son, Samuel Jesse. • Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest, whom he married in Bennington, Vermont, on April 10, 1994. Noland was her fourth husband; her previous spouses included Arthur F. Rense. Noland had an affair in the 1960s with artist and socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer.

Noland died of kidney cancer at his home in Port Clyde, Maine, on January 5, 2010, at the age of 85.

Noland had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris in 1948. In 1957, he had his first New York solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In 1964, Noland occupied half the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 1965, his work was exhibited at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum (New York). Noland's final solo exhibition, Kenneth Noland Shaped Paintings 1981–82, opened on October 29, 2009, at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on East 68th Street in New York City and was scheduled to close on January 9, 2010 (though the closing date was later extended to January 16). In 2010, Noland was honored with a solo presentation of his work at the Guggenheim Museum, entitled Kenneth Noland, 1924–2010: A Tribute. In addition, his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a range of international institutions, including the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (1983); Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain (1985); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2004); Tate, Liverpool (2006); and Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio (1986 and 2007).

Kenneth Noland worked in abstract art and visual arts. His work is associated with abstract art and abstract expressionism. He was employed by The Catholic University of America. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Letters and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kenneth Noland is recorded as painter, university teacher, printmaker and visual artist.