Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Kenneth Noland
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Yares Art (Exhibition: Fields of Color V)
34%
Japanese Quince. 1966. Acrylic on canvas
It feels like lazy criticism to say that Noland's shaped canvases are a gimmick, but considering the level at which other artists of his time (Olitski, Poons) managed to continue devising new pictorial effects without abandoning the format of the "easel painting," you can't really say that Noland's odd supports were, like, demanded by the state in which painting found itself in the sixties. (Not to mention the other guys, like Stella, who actually managed to make their weird shapes seem not just artistically, but pictorially unavoidable.) There's something that seems so given about Noland's hard lines here, something very calculated about their angles and proportions. "Given," I think, because it all seems subordinated to that dumb diamond shape: even the colors somehow seem to be subsidiary to the physical format. It goes without saying that it should have been the other way around; this is design, not art. (TFS, 2025)