Kenneth Noland, the best pure painter since 1950, the most under rated abstractionist of the 20th century, the post minimalist who had the rigour and the creamy love of hand applicaiton, a colourist of such subtlety and skill that to look at his work had an earthbound, american spirtualism, but mediated by a profound work ethic, the creator of important masterpeices in every decade of the 20th century, and a man whose stripes outclassed, outworked, and overmanouvered his rivals, is not the best living painting working as of yesterday.

(i love noland, i am a noland evangelist, last year i said this about him:
My favourite living painter, and this year I saw a dozen examples of his best work, not only a couple at the usual places in Edmonton, but 4 at the Abstract show at the Jewish Museum, one of his chevron stained paintings next to NE Thing's velvet ribbon riff on it at the AGO, and the joyous, cosmically humming 20 foot long stripe painting from 1967 to 1970. Can we please have a decent retrospective , please? )

from this year:
Greenberg had to expunge Johns from the canon for a number of reaons, most pointedly because it was obvious that Kenneth Noland==who Greenberg celebrated--had pilfered the format of his concentric circle painting directly from John's targets. Even more troubling was the fact that if Johns were allowed into the ranks of the chose, the keystone of Greenberg's argument that painterliness was dead would crumble. Greenberg had to admit that Johns had a nice hand. But he dimissed this talent wit h a brash as minor, implying that Johns was nothing more than a hand, ignoring the multitude of new issues that John's paintings placed at the centre of contemporary aesthetic practice. (146)

Noland is a better controlled painter then Johns, Noland's concentric circles were doing different work then John's targets, but she is right, that the four horsemen are still unappreciated for their painterly skills or their draughtsmenship, because critics like greenberg would lose if he admitted it, and because critics post greenberg were not interested in textual authority.


this i wrote two years ago:

3) Noland, Magus , 1962

All of what we go to Newman for, but better, because he is decorative, and the lack of taking oneself seriously while still making paintings that ravish at 22 feet seems a high wire act (seeing him live, seeing those pencil lines, and how he makes the colour straight, ie his techinique is almost process oriented)