Pure, Uncluttered Hedonism

By ROBERT HUGHES

The new retrospective show of paintings by Kenneth Noland--their stripes and chevrons wedged uneasily into the conchoid spaces of New York's Guggenheim Museum--provides a dismaying lesson in how critical fashions change. It is not very long since No-land's work, along with the stains of Morris Louis and the peach-bloom surfaces of Jules Olitski, was assigned an authority close to that of Holy Writ. This, formalist criticism said over and over again in the '60s, is the way painting must go: it is the inevitable future.

"Only an art of constant formal self-criticism," wrote the critic Michael Fried in a preface to an earlier Noland museum retrospective in 1965, "can bear or embody or communicate more than trivial meaning." Noland's work was self-critical in the extreme. It seemed made for--not to say, made by--the narrow and authoritarian standards of "tough" formalism, as issued to the world by Clement Greenberg and his epigones in Artforum. Nothing considered inessential to painting remained in it. No representation or symbolism. No drawing except of the most rudimentary and geometrical kind: circles, squares, chevrons, straight fast bands of color.

"I wanted to have color be the origin of the painting," Noland said in 1969. "I was trying to neutralize the layout, the shape, the composition in order to get at the color. Pollock had indicated getting away from drawing. I wanted to make color the generating force." On this proposition, and the paintings that flowed from it, a palace of exegesis was raised--an academy so pervasive hi its effect during the '60s that hundreds of younger artists from New York to Sydney could see no way past it. The polished assurance of Noland's style, its clear-cut shifts of format and structure succeeding one another like the terms of a syllogism, combined with the haughty, messianic tone of its supporting criticism to present a most intimidating fac,ade. Who, under that shadow, could call a stripe a stripe?

Pulsating With Light. Noland in the '60s was undeniably an accomplished colorist. In the best of his target paintings, like Virginia Site, 1959, he could set a splashy white rim whirling around concentric circles of black, yellow and blue with an airy energy that few American painters (and no European ones at the time) could equal. Like gigantic watercolors--which in effect they are--Noland's targets and chevrons bloom and pulsate with light. They offer a pure, uncluttered hedonism to the eye. But that is all they do offer. The more recent work, the plaid paintings of 1971 with their tartan grid of lines laid like pastel Mondrian across a blue ground, and the irregular polygonal canvases from 1976 with rays and cuts of color, cannot even do that. One realizes, descending the ramp of the Guggenheim, that Noland is hardly a giant of cultural history. He is simply an ornamental artist and--compared with the Arab tile makers, or the French metalworkers of 1900--a limited and pedantic one. There is little resonance in his paintings. They reliably engage the eye without shifting the mind's gears. Their content of felt experience, beyond the sensation of color itself, is so slight that it hardly exists.

The problem is one of specialization.

"Noland," writes Curator Diane Waldman in her catalogue essay, "ranks with Delacroix and the impressionists among the great color painters of the modern era. Unquestionably heir to Matisse and Klee in the realm of color expression, he is to his generation what they were to their own." This litany might have read better ten years ago than it does today; it is incantatory rubbish. Delacroix was not a "color painter" in any sense of the word that can be applied to Noland. He was a superb colorist whose art was occupied with matters other than the disinterested play of color on a flat surface. It had to do with the complexities of drawing from life, with adapting the lessons of Rubens, with theatricality, lust, tigers and Arabs, the problems of history painting and of allegory. Delacroix's success as a colorist cannot be separated from the wider ambitions of his painting. Neither can that of Matisse or the impressionists. Nor is there any real reason to suppose Noland could actually be to his generation what Matisse was to his. The scope and meaning of his art are too narrow and abstract for that. It takes more than talent and stripes--however delectable the color--to become a master. Robert Hughes

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