Kenneth Noland was a primary force in the development of postwar abstract art and colorfield painting.Noland was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American Color Field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement.He attended Black Mountain College in the late forties, exhibiting an early interest in the emotional effects of color and geometric forms. His commitment to line and color can be traced throughout his prolific oeuvre, including his Circle paintings and extending through a visual language of chevrons, diamonds, horizontal bands, plaid patterns, and shaped canvases.In 1977 a major traveling retrospective of the artist’s work was presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In response, late art critic of The New York Times Hilton Kramer wrote, “An art of this sort places a very heavy burden on the artist’s sensibility for color, of course—on his ability to come up, again and again, with fresh and striking combinations that both capture and sustain our attention, and provide the requisite pleasures... Mr. Noland is unquestionably a master.” The exhibition traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, before closing at the Denver Art Museum. SELECT COLLECTIONSArt Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IllinoisAustralian National Gallery, CanberraBaltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MarylandButler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OhioSt. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MissouriCleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OhioDes Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IowaDetroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MichiganFogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MassachusettsGovernor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, New YorkHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CaliforniaLouisiana Museum, Humlebaek, DenmarkMetropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkMilwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WisconsinMinneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MinnesotaCentre Georges Pompidou, ParisBoston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MassachusettsMuseum of Modern Art, New YorkNational Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North CarolinaNorton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CaliforniaPhillips Collection, Washington, D.C.Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MassachusettsSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New YorkStedelijk Museum, AmsterdamTate Gallery, LondonWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MinnesotaWhitney Museum of American Art, New York