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Modern abstract painting was esteemed by critic Clement Greenberg as "the best art of our time." Based on the experience of the senses rather than the literary premises of allegory, narrative, and realistic image, Modern abstract painting remained untainted by the nostalgia for realism that was earlier contaminated by the Social Realist art imposed by totalitarian dictators from the political Right and Left during the 1940s. But even within this degenerate context, the radical salvation offered by abstraction was not warmly embraced in the middle of the twentieth century. As Greenberg explained, "the real and fundamental source of dissatisfaction we may feel with abstract painting lies in the not uncommon problems offered by a new language." Writing in 1960, Greenberg named Kenneth Noland as part of this unconventional movement and acknowledged that "the insistence on the purely visual and the denial of the tactile and ponderable remain in tradition-and would not result in convincing art if they did not." It may be helpful to recall the artist's North Carolina links and the under-stated role this state has played in the history of Modern abstract painting. Kenneth Noland was born in an artistic family in Asheville and, after high school, joined the air force as a glider pilot and cryptographer. Returning from service, he enrolled at Black Mountain College where he studied with members of the newly arrived European avant-garde, Joseph Albers and Ilya Bolotowsky, until 1948. It was here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina that Noland encountered European geometric abstraction. Equipped with knowledge of the newly emerged American avant-garde and the "all-over" painting of Jackson Pollock, Noland went to Paris in 1948 where he absorbed the work of Mirò, Matisse, and Picasso. He particularly appreciated the "physicality" of their art, which stressed handwork and coupled "the ideal and the physical, the geometric and the painterly." In April 1949 Noland had his first one-man show in Paris. When he returned to the States, Noland found teaching positions in Washington, DC. Through Greenberg's support and friendship, he soon met Morris Louis, an artist who along with Noland constituted a Washington school of abstract painting. Although these artists admired the action paintings of Pollock, they sought to keep a distance from the New York scene and what they called the "dangers of the 'Tenth Street Touch'." In contrast to the dripping and slashing of action painting, the Washington School sought to demythologize the gestural activity of the New York artists. They preferred to stain their raw canvases allowing the accidental combinations of gravity and paint to create veils of color that floated across the surface like the improvised harmonies of jazz. With the publication of important critical reviews by Greenberg and others, the Washington School achieved a distinct identity by 1960. An exhibition, "The Washington Color Painters," at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965 underscored this presence. Meanwhile, Noland had a one-man show at French and Company in 1959 and later a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1965. The Corcoran Gallery and Hirshhorn Museum presented another retrospective of his work in 1977. Untitled, 1967, a generous gift to Davidson College by this gracious artist, offers the unique opportunity to consider exactly how an artist collects and recollects himself. With its vibrant colors and rhythms, the painting wonderfully represents Noland's larger oeuvre, which is included as a subject of study in any serious course in modern painting. His conjugation of geometric forms in their mystical totality reminds the viewer that Noland was an analyst of secret codes. His new visual language, like a series of modern hieroglyphs, draws from the lexicon of targets, tondos, circles, stripes, chevrons, diamonds, lozenges, polygons, plaids, doors, and flares that has structured his entire career. The discipline of color and control is always the main concern in what Noland calls his "one shot paintings." In describing their impact he says they are akin to "looking across a street at a group of pedestrians; suddenly one of them glances your way; that quality of connection is what I'd like those colors to have-but abstractly." His dedication to color-historically related to the painting of the Byzantines and Venetians, Rubens and Monet-and his refined sense of control-drawn from the work of Degas and Matisse-allow him to seek a synthetic solution between equaling surface and three-dimensional surface, which he refers to as a "juggling act." Color determines structure for Noland. In this juggling act he isolates color within its own context because he feels "the thing is color . . ." Noland's task is "to find a way to get color down, to float it without bogging the painting down in Surrealism, Cubism, or systems of structure . . . The presence of the painting is all that's important." This "disembodied color," according to Greenberg, operates in "naked fabric works as a generalizing and unifying field" and produces a "hypnotic opticality" on a grand scale. The unified primacy of the color creates an all-over picture which "breathes" without plunging into the wall, fabricating the falsity of illusionist representation, or mythologizing self-expression. Ever since Greenberg redefined the role of Modern painting as a picture that subordinates decorative and illusionist purposes to dramatic formal effects and an "all-over" quality, it has been interpreted as an independent "equivalence" which transcends nature. The Modern abstract painter was challenged to render "every element and every area of the picture equivalent in accent and emphasis." creating an experience analogous to music. For the critic of the Modern abstract painting, this emphasis on painting's material properties produced the problematic opposition of the "decorative" and the "dramatic," a dialectic which has dominated the critique of Modern painting. As Greenberg warned, "Decoration is the specter that haunts modernist painting, and part of the latter's mission is to find ways of using the decorative against itself." Modern abstract painting, as opposed to "Pre-Modern" or "Post Modern" painting, pursued a "literal essence" which could not be subjugated to the vagaries of human activity. While heroically seeking to present rather than represent that which was unpresentable, such literalness, defined in terms of "flatness" and "truth to the medium," remained vulnerable to the debasing charge of "decoration." Greenberg continued, Painting of
a kind that identifies itself exclusively with surface cannot help
developing toward decoration and suffering a certain narrowing of
its range of expression. It may compensate for this by a greater
intensity and concreteness. Contemporary art has done this with
a signal success . . .
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Presentation
of Honorary Degree for Kenneth Noland
We honor here today North Carolina's preeminent nationally and internationally acclaimed artist. A native of Asheville, our honoree grew up in an artistic family and served as an Air Force glider pilot and cryptographer as a young man. He attended the now legendary Black Mountain College, where he first encountered European geometric abstraction. A year in Paris followed, leading to his first one-man show there in the spring of 1949. Nurturing, developing, and exporting the modernist ideals formed in Black Mountain and Paris, he and other avant-garde artists of the '50s and '60s became leaders of contemporary American art. His early experimentation was with stain painting, a chance combination of gravity and thin pigment that created veils of color floating across unstretched canvas like improvised jazz harmonies. Our honoree moved on to embrace the freeing tenets of hard-edge and color field painting in reaction to brush-stroke gesture and figures-on-a-field-type abstraction. Instead, he created meticulously symmetrical symbols completely integrating color and structure, canvas plane and edges. These essential breakthroughs in stain, geometric, and color field painting are recognized as the epitome of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. His work of this era was featured at the Venice Biennale of 1964 and in a one-man exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum in 1965. He was elected, in 1977, to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Our honoree's innovative visual language of targets, chevrons, tondos, polygons, flares, and vast horizontal stripes brought color resonance to the forefront of American painting. Embracing a discipline of color and control, his cool, distanced pictures established groundbreaking boundaries for the possibilities of expression in purely abstract terms, as well as new standards of clarity, elegance, and immediacy. Throughout his lengthy career he has held teaching positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Catholic University, the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, Pratt Institute, and Bard College; collaborated with architect I. M. Pei on the Wiesner Building at MIT; and served on the Board of Trustees at Bennington College in Vermont, where he now lives. In addition, our honoree has become a generous friend to Davidson College. He donated a significant piece of work to be auctioned in fundraising efforts for the Visual Arts Center, entrusted us with nearly seven million dollars worth of his favorite paintings for Van Every Gallery's second exhibition in 1993, and attended that retrospective opening, graciously spending hours with interested students and faculty. In 1995 he received the highest honor bestowed by our state, the North Carolina Award in Fine Art. He continues to produce paintings actively and to exhibit frequently all over the world. Because you
have blessed our world with your own ingenious and vibrantly colorful
visual dialect;
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