Kenneth Noland - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2019 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Helander Gallery, Palm Beach
    Private Collection
    Phillips, New York, May 15, 2015, lot 180
    Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Palm Beach, Helander Gallery, Kenneth Noland: An Important Exhibition of Paintings from 1959 to 1989, February 7 - March 3, 1990

  • Catalogue Essay

    “I’m a one-shot painter.” Kenneth Noland

    A striking example of Kenneth Noland’s celebrated Diamond series, Greenbriar stands among the artist’s earliest works on shaped canvas – a technique he innovated – which cemented him as one of the most important purveyors of American abstraction. Painted in 1966, Greenbriar manifests itself with an all-encompassing presence of pure form and sublime color. The result of Noland's highly controlled and premeditated staining method, whereby any modification or revision is nearly impossible due to his application of thinned paint onto raw canvas, here the picture plane is transformed into a dynamic color field. The present work is a beautiful example of Noland’s so-called needle diamonds of the mid to late 1960s, setting the foundation for his acclaimed asymmetrical shaped canvases of the 1970s and 1980s.

    While working in the lineage of artistic forebears such as Piet Mondrian and Ilya Bolotowsky, Noland’s teachers at Black Mountain College, these diamond canvases represent a major innovation in the history of modern art. As art historian Kenworth Moffett noted in 1979 in reference to this series, “Noland thinks more abstractly” than Mondrian, “and, characteristically, he interlocks the outside and the inside. The diamond is used to accommodate not lines but colored bands in chevron formation…At once open and delimited, they have no unambiguous, behind-the-frame feeling; they seem to be simultaneously a cutout from a series of larger chevrons marching off in one direction and a completely self-sufficient picture object” (Kenworth Moffett, Kenneth Noland, New York, 1979, p. 56). While demonstrating Noland’s undisputed abilities as a colorist, Untitled thus epitomizes a major milestone in the artist's career-long pursuit of achieving a harmonious union between support image.

Property of an Important Private Collector, Europe

Ο166

Greenbriar

signed, titled and dated "GREENBRIAR Kenneth Noland 1966" on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
94 1/2 x 23 5/8 in. (240 x 60 cm.)
Painted in 1966.

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $337,500

Contact Specialist
John McCord
Head of Day Sale, Morning Session
New York
+1 212 940 1261
jmccord@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 May | On View at 432 and 450 Park Avenue