The straight and narrow ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
I must urge anyone seriously concerned with art, or even beginning to nod in its direction, to go post-haste to Kasmin's Gallery in Bond Street to see four large canvases by the Ameri- can painter, Kenneth Noland. There has been nothing quite like this experience in recent years; the nearest approach to it was when Anthony Caro showed his big Prairie sculpture at the same premises last year. Noland is in early middle age and his paintings have always plotted an equation between an extreme restric- tion of formal means and a flair for invented colour that has invariably travelled, radiantly, a good deal further in eloquence than the severe grids which it implements. The new paintings transcend anything he has done before and come nearer to a synthesis of this intriguing imbalance than one would have believed possible. They are probably master- - pieces: so magnificently themselves and so absolutely beautiful on their own terms. The sheer delight imparted by these paintings drives all the usual standards and workaday refer- ences from one's head. You are in for a rare treat.
The paintings are very long horizontal can- vases, divided into horizontal bands of colour that are separated by strips of unpainted can- vas. The bands of colour vary greatly in width; the bare strips are fairly uniformly narrow. The canvas itself, as disclosed between the long bands of colour, becomes yet another colour —or rather set of tones, because its own neutral buff changes from light to dark according to the colour above and below it. Great play is made with expansion and contrac- tion and, whenever there are several narrow bands of colour, the alternate strips of canvas become, optically, more concentrated and therefore darker: spaciousness in the bands makes for apparently lighter tones in the canvas.
The largest work is thirty feet long by nearly eight feet high (a steady flow of intelligent and ungullible people are filing reverentially past at this moment, or standing in rapt contemplation in front of the marvellous thing) and the other three are twelve feet ten inches by four feet ten inches. If vertical paintings may be said to stand up and horizontal paintings recline, then these four canvases turn the recumbent posture into something so outrageous as to bring a blush to one's cheek.
I am still not sure how Kenneth Noland started, but he has always been the spearhead of that painting movement in America (for which Clement Greenberg is the spokesman and authority) that has sought to free colour, not only from normally descriptive functions, but also from the slightest suggestion of sub- sidiary activity of any kind. Canvases are so drenched in colour, as in Olitski, that we are unconscious of anything else; or suggestive shapes, as in Frankenthaler or Louis, are so wholly registered in terms of colour that, again, colour displaces any further considerations and reigns supreme. A hallmark of most of these artists is the use of Liquatex pigment, a type of water-soluble acrylic paint eminently suited to rapid handling and capable of direct translucency as well as opacity—above all, of a new range of brilliant colours.
There is a puritan instinct behind the urge to eliminate any trace of handling from the painting. No brush work, certainly no impasto, is visible, only pure colour. This form of art sets its face against the slightest flicker of repre- sentation. I respect and sometimes like what is being done along these lines, but, like most `pure' movements of an extreme kind, its creed occasionally freezes into an orthodoxy and the comparative modesty of certain of its achieve- ments is scarcely matched either by the com- placency of some of its practitioners or by the rather arrogant ruthlessness with which its protagonists attempt to dismiss other view- points and methods.
Rather like the way in which telegraph lines, shooting past a train window, seem to move up and down and sometimes give a disruptive skip, so do the coloured bands in Noland's paintings. The surfaces 'breathe,' shallowly or deeply, according to the expansion or contraction of the bands of colour. Rothko gets the same effect with softer means.
And now I have touched on everything ex- cept the most important and central feature : colour. This is entirely invented and synthetic, absolutely peculiar to Noland, and I find it fiendishly hard to describe. It has mostly a
kind of soft freshness never acid, sometimes shar,i, it is best characterised by a range of words which should only characterise the colour, not pull the mind away to the actual objects it can otherwise represent. The qualities are raspberry red, lime green, melon yellow, coffee or peach, mango pink and so on. And to make a complete fool of myself, I will add that if Noland's colour is, as always, synthetic and abstract, then the atmosphere or mood generated by each canvas is specific and very real. A lot of his colour is like the range discovered in cos- metics: not only the lipsticks and nail varnishes but in the slightly tab or peachy face powders and creams.
If these unpopulated bands are like musical staves filled in with colour, then some cheer- fully nostalgic themes are being played. I found myself thinking of the 'twenties and 'thirties and the world of flappers, chiffon dresses, young fellows in striped blazers, river parties, Dufy, van Dongen, Coco Chanel, lime fizz, sun-tan cream, beach huts, palm trees and blue skies at Nice or Monte Carlo, Molyneux, Lanvin, brown bread and butter ice at Gunters and so on. The artist doubtless in- tended none of this, but if you free colour from representation or any responsibility other than being itself, then you cannot suppress association in the eye of the beholder. Rothko, after all, has his sombre 'Rembrandt' canvases and his cheerful 'Bonnard-sunrise' paintings, by implication. That is the great thing about art: the life of a painting or sculpture forever ex- tended in resonance, like a coin endlessly falling down a fathomless well and sending up metallic sounds as it bounces off crevices in its descent—or, in this case, a coin endlessly skittering across a calm sea in some evocative game of ducks and drakes.
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