Shadow Line Kenneth Noland

Kenneth Noland’s career began in company with the Colour-Field painters responding to Abstract Expressionism predominating the American art of the 1950s. However, with his increasingly precisely outlined geometrical forms he soon became a leading representative of Post-Painterly Abstraction. His painting based on colours was largely influenced, similarly to his contemporaries, by the use of acrylic paint. The concentric circles painted in the 1960s gave way to the V („chevron”) motifs on trapezoid canvases. The increasingly elongated form eventually turned into parallel horizontal streaks in the pictures of 1967-70. The narrow colour bands of great horizontal expansion, often covering entire walls, fill the whole vision field of the viewer. Noland’s goal is clear: to create unambiguous relations between the pictorial motif and the canvas format, size and borders, within which the autonomous existence of colours can be ensured. The utterly simplified, seemingly passive form results in climactic emotional experience elicited with basic pictorial tools.
Noland’s graphic works are often subsequent condensations of the colour combinations of wall-size paintings. He made the screenprint variant on canvas of one of the most imposing and earliest streak paintings, Shadow Line, in 150 copies. The subtle colour array of the 2×6 m picture (1967) preserved in the Ludwig Museum in Cologne was modified in the smaller version with the addition of further colours applied in the whites separating the colours, and this lends greater emphasis to nuances in the smaller picture, to intimate details otherwise contradicting Noland’s approach to painting.

Ferenc Tóth