Kenneth Noland

Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Rowan, Pasadena (acquired in May 1966)
Wanda Hansen, Sausalito
Graham Gund (acquired from the above in November 1978)
The Gund Art Foundation

Irvine, University of California, Selections from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Rowan collects ion, 1967
San Francisco Museum of Art, American Art of the Sixties, June - July 1967
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art; Toledo Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, April 1977 - May 1978, cat. no. 51, pp. 32 and 86, illustrated in color
Boston, Museum of Replica Handbags s, A Private Vision: Contemporary Art from the Graham Gund collects ion, February - April 1982, p. 37, illustrated in color
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of Replica Handbags s, In Private Hands: 200 Years of American Painting, October 2005 - January 2006

Kenneth Moffett, Kenneth Noland, New York, 1977, no. 161, illustrated in color
Karen Wilkin, Kenneth Noland, New York, 1990, pl. 25, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges, resulting in a faint white abrasion at the left edge and one on the left side just above the black painted area. There are a few minor spot accretions visible at the left and right edges. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
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Grave Light by Kenneth Noland beautifully captures the emotional power and phenomenal inventiveness that has garnered the artist’s critical acclaim. The virtuosity of Noland's technique is demonstrated in full force here, in both the illusory motion of the interacting colors and the static balance of the symMetricas l angles, not mitigated by brushwork or any other signs of the artist's hand. Turning away from the gesture-laden, textured surfaces that typified much of Abstract Expressionist painting, the present work displays a bold cascade of impermeable pulsating color. Four sweeping bands radiate in parallel from the peak of the expansive eight-foot by seventeen-foot shaped canvas. The unique visual structure of Grave Light combines crisp pictorial logic and thoughtful control with the colorful expression of an organic and earthy color palette.

Noland’s signature use of repetitive designs and banded colors resembles the artwork of Josef Albers, the head of the Art Department at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during Noland’s attendance from 1946-48. Eventually Noland would travel abroad to France, where his intensive study of Matisse and Klee figured prominently in the development of his primary concern with color. Upon his return from Paris, Noland met Clement Greenberg, arguably the most influential art critic of the t.mes , in the summer of 1950. The relationship would prove immensely significant to Noland’s development as an artist. Greenberg publicly promoted Noland’s work in an array of writings and exhibitions, most notably in a 1960 Art International article: “If Noland has to be categorized, I would call him a ‘color’ painter too. His color counts by its claritys and its energy; it is not there neutrally, to be carried by the design and drawing; it does the carrying itself.”

Noland worked in a variety of series that included the weightless pictorial solution of the early Target paintings (1958-63), and the later colorful, controlled and refined Chevron paintings and diamond-shaped variants, of which this is a paramount example. In the spring of 1962, Noland moved from Washington D.C. to the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, where he began experimenting with his now-iconic chevron motif. Over many iterations of the Chevron paintings, Noland increasingly experimented with the negative expanses of raw canvas surrounding his bands of color. Starting with a few experimental works in 1964, Noland began to unify the shape of his canvas supports with that of the chevron motif by rotating his square canvases into diamonds. By eliminating inactivated areas of raw canvas, Noland solved any issues of figure-ground relationships and created a compositional format that kept the immediacy and tension of the chevrons, while giving an even greater presence to his bands of color. As noted by the curator of Noland’s 1977 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Diane Waldman: “Once Noland started to explore the diamond-shaped support, he began to play with the possibilities of the chevron motif. He produced several broadened diamonds, powerful works in which the interior chevron configuration conformed exactly with the shape of the support. Most notable among these are Grave Light, 1965, and Dark Sweet Cherry, 1966." (Diane Waldman, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, Exh. Cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1977, p. 32)

An impressive scale and elegant example of 1960s Color Field Painting, Grave Light expresses a harmonious balance of pictorial dynamism and rigid geometric design. The all-over composition denies any reading of the painting as an image to be looked into, and insists on its reality as non-representative object. There is an undeniable integrity and originality to Grave Light, which depends wholly on Noland’s profound ability to sublimate the instantaneity of the reading of what it is the viewer is observing.