The artist at his home in South Shaftesbury, Vermont 1965 Photo: Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved. Art © 2021 Estate of Kenneth Noland / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society, New York, NY

Captivating in its chromatic intensity and dynamism, Kenneth Noland's Rocker is an iconic example of his breakthrough Target series. Executed in 1958, the year the artist adopted his iconic concentric ring structure, Rocker is a sensational example of Noland's most celebrated and influential series, the apex of his exploration of the unadulterated beauty of color and form and a singular achievement in contemporary art.

Left: Kenneth Noland, Heat, 1958, Private Collection Art © 2021 Estate of Kenneth Noland / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society, New York, NY Sold at Sothebys New York for $3,370,000

Right: Helen Frankenthaler, Small’s Paradise, 1964, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. © 2021 HELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION, INC. / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

An important early work, Rocker encapsulates a pivotal moment in Noland's highly acclaimed career, underscored by its inclusion in his 1997 Guggenheim retrospective in New York. The classic purity of rich primary colors spiraling within the canvas is juxtaposed with unprimed passages, the modulated spheres vibrating and pulsating, softened by Noland's unique staining technique. The fact that Rocker was executed partially on unprimed canvas marks it as an exceptionally rare work. Unpainted along the edges and between the central sphere and first painted band, the color seeps into the canvas, and when paired with the fervent strokes of the outermost circle, Rocker projects an ineffably raw and passionate intensity. Through the juxtaposition of the geometric circles against the exterior band, which spirals outwards with ferocious marks, Noland creates the illusion of the painting itself transcending the edges of the canvas. The varying widths of bands and dichotomy between light and dark appear to move outward from the painting's center, fluctuating as the eye moves in a triumphant investigation of color and form.

The Birth of Colorfield Painting
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The Birth of Colorfield Painting

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    Two figureheads of American Color Field painting, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were not only contemporaries, but good friends. The two met in the early 1950s, when both were teaching at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C.
  • Leonard McCombe / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images
     
    Also in the early 1950s, Noland met and became friends with notable art critic Clement Greenberg – the man who would go on to become a major champion of both artists, and ultimately coin the term ‘Color Field Painting.’
  • Gordon Parks / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images
     
    During a visit to New York City in April 1953, Greenberg encouraged both Noland and Louis to visit the studio of a young artist named Helen Frankenthaler. Upon taking his advice, they saw and were greatly impressed by her stain paintings – in particular Mountains and Sea .
  • Ernst Haas / Getty Images
     
    The influence of Frankenthaler’s technique, then in its nascent stages, was profound for both Noland and Louis. Ultimately, the meeting of the three artists became a catalyst for each to create their best-known work.
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    Kenneth Noland’s circle motif from the late 1950’s are quintessential examples of the Colorfield Painting Movement and encapsulate the spirit of the artists oeuvre. As curator and museum director Diane Waldman has explained, “The spare geometry of his form heightens the emotional impact of his color. The rational and the felt, distilled form and sensuous color inter- mesh to create a magic presence. His color is space. Color is all,” (Diane Waldman, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, exhibition. catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, 1977, p. 36)
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    After his impactful visit to the studio of Helen Frankenthaler Louis began producing his Veils. The Veils address formalist concerns of the canvas surface as an expansive, flat, nonfigural field. In 1954, Louis’s Veil paintings immediately engaged him with one of the most significant artistic circles of the time under the critical direction of Clement Greenberg and the critic included the Veils in Louis’s first solo exhibition at French & Company in New York.
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    Louis began working on his seminal Stripe paintings in early 1961, immediately following his Unfurled series. In the Stripes, the artist continued focusing on how to overcome the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic that had taken the art world by storm in the 1950s and cultivate a distinctive style of his own. The Stripe series represents the absolute apogee of Louis’s intense concentration on color and his desire to elevate color as an individual force unto itself.
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“Noland's search for the ideal Platonic form has crystallized into an art in which color and form are held in perfect equilibrium,"
Diane Waldman in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, 1977, p. 36

Rocker embodies a seminal period during which Noland began to employ the circle motif and square canvas with greater urgency, rendering highly evocative works through a dichotomously rigid fixation on geometric forms. The works betray the influence of Josef Albers, employing the same themes and concerns as Albers’ Homage to the Square series, exploring symmetry, harmony, and the juxtaposition of colors. Furthermore, the contrast of control and explosive energy is reminiscent of Adolph Gottlieb’s renowned series of Burst paintings. Within Noland's artistic vocabulary, the circle becomes a symbol of eternity, a complex and organic shape referencing both the tradition of recurrent circular motifs in art history and common structures in the natural world. However, despite their name, Noland's series of paintings are not of targets, as the artist sought to remove all narrative and emotional content from his paintings. Instead, each canvas examined pure color as its subject. Noland explains, "I wanted color to be the origin of painting...I wanted to make color the generating force." (Kenneth Noland quoted in: Paul Richard, ‘Look Who’s Back, Letting Color Sing’, Washington Post, 30 September 1977, p. C2)

Kenneth Noland in his studio, 1960. Photo: Vic Casamento/The Washington Post/Getty images
Art © Estate of Kenneth Noland/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Jasper Johns, Target, 1961, Image © The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois / Brdigeman, Art © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA / New York, NY

Color is Noland's primary instrument; he plays the scores of hues and light, finely tuning the band's width and spacing to imbue his pigments with a precise emotional resonance. Describing his unique ability to produce intensely evocative abstractions from basic geometric forms, Noland explains, "I had to find a way in each picture to change the drawing, shaping and tactile qualities to make these elements expressive as the color had subsumed the possibility of these parts being on an equal basis of expressiveness." (Kenneth Noland in conversation with Karen Wilkin in: Karen Wilkin, Kenneth Noland, Barcelona 1990, p. 10) With unparalleled vivacity, the improvisational gestures that frame Noland's target imbue the canvas with a burst of energy. Rocker is an exceptional exemplar of Noland's painterly virtuosity and lyrical use of color to alter the compositional devices of his concentric circles, creating a simultaneously strikingly simplified and profoundly entrancing emotive form.

Artist
Kenneth Noland