Impactful in scale and utterly entrancing in its serene palette of blues and compositional symmetry, Blue Extent from 1962 is a masterful example from Kenneth Noland’s most acclaimed Target series. Of the most influential figures of the Color Field movement and Post-War abstraction, Noland explored the conceptual possibilities of color and created profoundly thoughtful and mesmerizing compositions that challenged the status quo of American abstraction. Diverting from the thick application of paint and all-over compositions of the Abstract Expressionists, Noland produced soak-stained canvases and reclaimed a compositional center in his abstractions. Blue Extent was one of the final works painted in the artist’s early and brief Target series. Spanning only half a decade between the late 1950s and early 1960s, the series is widely recognized as a pioneering conceptual achievement of Post-War American abstraction.

Composed of four concentric rings, each smooth and continuous, Blue Extent, suggests a sense of endlessness. Anchored by a deep yet bright blue circle, followed by a ring of pure black and white, and enclosed with a soft blue, the present work is unified and complete, like the shifting colors of the sky from day into night. The rings of the composition appear to reverberate, as if they may echo infinitely, extending off the canvas. While the concentric circles in many of Noland’s other Target paintings are of a smaller scale relative to the size of the canvas, the outer circle in Blue Extent reaches nearly to the edge of the composition, suggesting that the rings continue on past the picture plane.

After serving as a pilot and cryptographer in WWII, Noland returned to his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina and used the GI Bill to attend Black Mountain College. Just twenty miles from Asheville, Black Mountain College was the home to some of the most innovative and salient artists of the mid twentieth century. While enrolled from 1946 to 1948, Noland studied under Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers, who would each have discernable impacts on his career. Though Noland studied more extensively under Bolotowsky, the relationship between Noland and Albers’s practices is undeniable. Through their own methodologies, Noland and Albers studied repeating graphic forms that provided frameworks for their percipient analyses of color. In the following decade, Noland became a forerunner of a new type of abstraction devoted to an exploration of color. He would use a soak-staining technique inspired by that of Helen Frankenthaler, in which pigment seeped into the fibers of the unprimed canvas, allowing for the painting to maintain an utterly flat surface.

Rejecting the all-over compositions of the Abstract Expressionists, like Jackson Pollock, Noland reasserted the power of a central composition, providing an optical focus from which he could explore his true fascination: color. Like Albers, Noland developed a compositional framework of distilled graphic shapes that enabled him to foreground the mutual effects of the colors he employed. Diane Waldman, author of Noland’s 1997 retrospective catalogue, writes: “Noland's search of the ideal Platonic form has crystallized into an art in which color and form are held in perfect equilibrium. The spare geometry of his form heightens the emotional impact of his color. The rational and the felt, distilled form and sensuous color intermesh to create a magic presence. His space is color. His color is space. Color is all.” (Diane Waldman in Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective, 1977, p. 36)

Blue, white, and black rings emanate from the center of Blue Extent in pure visual harmony. The concentric circles are an evocative motif with multiple possible references – a sense of infinity, the ripples in water during rainfall, or even the globe from inside of an airplane, but their purpose is to make space for a conceptual investigation of color. Blue Extent is an exceptionally beautiful and mature example of Noland’s Target paintings, from the last year before he moved on to new compositional arrangements that would occupy the remaining sixty years of his life. While the earlier Target works bear more jagged and loosely defined edges, Blue Extent is resolute – with smooth lines and large rings that speak to the accomplished articulation of Noland’s profound and unique aesthetic investigation. The dazzling dialogue between the white, black, and shades of blue in the present work is an optical sensation, totally captivating the viewer.

Artist

Kenneth Noland