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KENNETH NOLAND (1924-2010)

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KENNETH NOLAND - Passage - acrylic on canvas - 69 1/2 x 140 1/2 in.

Passage196369 1/2 x 140 1/2 in.(176.53 x 356.87 cm) acrylic on canvas

Provenance

Private Collection, Florida
Sale: Sotheby's New York: Thursday, October 5, 1989, Lot 100
Sale: Christie's South Kensington: Friday, June 30, 2000, Lot 175
Private Collection, Florida, acquired from the above sale
Private Collection
Price1,500,000

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“Color can convey a total range of mood and expression, of one’s experience in life, without having to give it descriptive or literary qualities.” – Kenneth Noland

History

From late 1958 and until 1961, Kenneth Noland created a mystique of devotion to the circle to demonstrate he could advance color as the generating source capable of neutralizing layout, shape, and composition. Though he was a former student of Josef Albers and Ilya Bolotwosky, the vibrant, pulsing hues dedicated to that simple form arrived unexpectedly from a much younger source, the brilliant 24-year-old Helen Frankenthaler, when Noland, Morris Louis, and Clement Greenberg visited her New York studio on April 3, 1953. That date, now etched in the annals of Post War art lore marks a dawning of an era when Post-Painterly Abstraction and Color Field Painting were to become viable alternatives to gestural abstraction and action painting. The two artists, deeply moved by the translucence of Frankenthaler’s vibrant washes of Mountains and Sea, returned to Washington D.C. and began to experiment with thinned paint concoctions. But whereas Louis allowed gravity to drip and pour thinned acrylic to produce cascading, translucent color veils, Noland chose a more traditional approach. He applied paint with brush or roller and produced vibrant and pulsing hues to create a successive series of geometrically oriented pictures embracing circles, ovals, chevrons, stripes, and diamonds. For both artists, spatial resonance and the lyrical quality of pure color became the driving force of inspiration. But it was Noland’s sparse geometry that provided a context of order and symmetry that elevated the emotional impact of color in unsuspected ways.

Several controlling metaphors dominate these basic formal elements including solar metaphors, musical metaphors, and metaphors related to site, place, or target. But as indicated by several titles assigned to the paintings of interlocking V-shaped, triangular bands of color that belong to his iconic Chevron series, Noland had not completely suppressed a desire to connect to us through his personal thoughts and reflections despite the absolute, non-objective geometry of his art. Unveiled shortly after the death of his friend Morris Louis in September 1962, works such as Trans Flux, Flush, Bridge, Across, Another World, Dusk and Passage, connect us to Noland’s reflections on loss and mortality. Independent of that context, Passage provides a fantastic demonstration of Noland’s canny mastery of color — three bands of medium-lean, deftly applied acrylic paint placed upon an aubergine background. Spartan in design, yet as rich as it is complex, the composite effect is a dazzling display of hues brought to an engaging, interdependent intensity: a bold chartreuse band on the bottom, a tamped down, tinted sky-blue above, and an ameliorating narrow ochre band sandwiched between the two. The earliest Chevron canvases are of a squarish format, but here, the proportions are necessarily elongated to accommodate this oddly compelling, side-by-side conjoined arrangement. That composition and structure is verily unique among the series, but traditional in one sense. The upward thrust and perfect symmetry of the center chevron is the inverted ‘V’ commonly associated with the truest orientation of a chevron. Regardless, Passage is a deeply personal creation, extraordinarily generous in scale at almost six by twelve feet and it has a bracing effect upon viewing. Its conjoined arrangement is effectively a ‘double u’, its crisp lines origami-like in structure, its metaphorical nature suggesting a wave, or a bird in flight and by extension, it presents as a redoubt of a man’s faith in, or perhaps his hope for, a transcendent life beyond this corporeal existence.

Kenneth Noland in his studio during the 1960s, Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah
Kenneth Noland, “Beginning” (1956), magna on canvas Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Kenneth Noland, “Another World” (1963)
Helen Frankenthaler in front of “Mountains and Sea” (1952)
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952

“There’s no picture that I know of where the subject carries as much expressive possibility as the actual execution of the picture.” – Kenneth Noland

MARKET INSIGHTS

According to ARTDAI, a third-party art market analytics firm, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for Noland’s market prices is 9.51%.
The record price for a Kenneth Noland painting at auction was just set in May 2021 when “Rocker” (1958) sold for $4,255,000 USD.
Of the top 10 Noland sales at auction, all but one occurred within the last decade, signaling the strength of the artist’s market.
A comparable chevron painting, “Baba Yagga” (1964) sold for $2,355,000 USD in 2018.

Top Results at Auction

“Rocker” (1958), acrylic on canvas, 54.8 x 54.8 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: May 12, 2021, for $4,255,000 USD

“Blue” (1960), oil on canvas, 60.5 x 59.3 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: May 16, 2019, for $3,500,000 USD

“Heat” (1958), acrylic on canvas, 65 x 63 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: November 12, 2015 for $3,370,000 USD

“Fair” (1960), oil on canvas, 56.1 x 56 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: November 16, 2017 for $3,136,000 USD

Comparable Paintings Sold at Auction

“Baba Yagga” (1964), acrylic on canvas, 64.3 x 66.3 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: May 17, 2018 for $2,355,000

Similar chevron shape subject
From a year later

“Trans Flux” (1963), magna on canvas, 101.8 x 163 in. Sold at Sotheby’s New York: May 19, 2017 for $1,812,500

Same year
Chevron shape subject

“Across” (1964), acrylic on canvas, 95.7 x 115.9 in. Sold at Christie’s New York: May 18, 2018 for $1,722,500

Smaller painting from a year later
Chevron subject with similar color palette

“Blue-Green Confluence” (1963), acrylic on canvas, 70.1 x 70.1 in. Sold at Christie’s New York: November 14, 2019 for $975,000

Same year and subject
Similar color palette
Half the size

Paintings in Museum Collections

“Blue Veil” (1964), synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 69 7/8 x 69 7/8 in, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

“Trans Shift” (1964), acrylic on canvas, 100 x 113 1/2 in, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

“New Day” (1967), acrylic on canvas, 89 3/8 × 184 ¼ in, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

“October” (1961), acrylic on canvas, 94-1/4 x 92-1/4 x 1-3/8 in, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“Shoot” (1964), acrylic on canvas, 103 3⁄4 x 126 3⁄4 in., The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

“There are two things that go on in art. There’s getting to the essential material and a design that’s inherent in the use of material, and also an essential level of expressiveness, a precise way of saying something rather than a complicated way.” – Kenneth Noland