News obit: Abstract artist Kenneth Noland

From the New York Times:

Kenneth Noland, who painted some of the great emblems of the postwar American abstract style called Color Field painting, died Tuesday at his home in Port Clyde, Me. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest. He was 85.

Born in Asheville, N.C., in 1924, he studied art at the adventurous, short-lived Black Mountain College (conveniently located just outside his hometown) from 1946 to 1948, was inspired by the stain-painting technique that Helen Frankenthaler deducted from Jackson Pollock’s drips, and had his first exhibition in New York in 1957, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Mr. Noland’s signature motif was a radiant target made of rings of pure color strained directly on raw canvas, with that canvas contributing a wonderful sense of breathing room between each band of color. The power of the colors, their often discordant interaction and the expanding and contracting rhythms of the bands of paint and the raw canvas, could be stunningly direct and vibrant. Mr. Noland’s work was championed by Clement Greenberg and other formalist art critics, but in the beginning it was also greatly admired by more wide-ranging critics, including Donald Judd.