Kenneth Noland

André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Harcus, Krakow, Rosen and Sonnabend Gallery, Boston
Christie's, New York, May 13, 1998, Lot 387
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

"Other forces are at work as well.  The drive toward pure color, like the impulse to flatness, can be seen as no more than a direct response to function and use.  Modern society asks of painting only that it be art, that it fulfill no other need than an aesthetic one.  And modern 'authenticity' proscribes that the picture itself declare this fact...The most purely 'optical' and most purely aestheic pictorial property of all is, color, and this, together with the fact that pictorial color is relatively unexplored territory accounts, I think, for its decisive role in the development of modernist painting.  It accounts for the ease with which we can explain this development as a drive toward color." 
-- Kenworth Moffat, Kenneth Noland, New York, 1977, p. 32