1. Kenneth Noland was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s as a minimalist painter.
14 Facts About Kenneth Noland
1. 2.
Kenneth Noland had four siblings: David, Bill, Neil, and Harry Jr.
3.
Kenneth Noland enlisted in the US Air Force in 1942 after completing high school.
4.
At Black Mountain, where two of his brothers studied art, Kenneth Noland studied with Ilya Bolotowsky, a professor who introduced him to neoplasticism and the work of Piet Mondrian.
5.
In 1948 and 1949 Kenneth Noland worked with Ossip Zadkine in Paris, and had his first exhibition of his paintings there in 1949.
6.
Kenneth Noland 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.
7.
Kenneth Noland pioneered the shaped canvas, initially with a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical diamonds or chevrons.
8.
Kenneth Noland emphasized spatial relationships in his work by leaving unstained, bare canvas as a contrast against the colors used throughout his paintings.
9.
Kenneth Noland used simplified abstraction so the design would not detract from the use of color.
10.
Kenneth Noland's students included the sculptor Jennie Lea Knight and painter Alice Mavrogordato.
11.
Kenneth Noland had an affair in the 1960s with artist and socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer.
12.
Kenneth Noland died of kidney cancer at his home in Port Clyde, Maine, on January 5,2010, at the age of 85.
13.
Kenneth Noland had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris in 1948.
14.
In 1964, Kenneth Noland occupied half the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale.