The artist best known for his paintings of rings of color died today. (Roberta Smith’s obit here.)
In Seattle, Noland’s 1969 painting Relic will be familiar to those who haunt the minimalism gallery.
According to a web search of SAM’s collection, the museum also has a very sweet untitled small Noland print from 1973; it was given to the museum by none other than Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008 (my obit here).
I wish I could do a similar web search of the collection at Portland Art Museum in Oregon, where they’ve got plenty of Nolands, given that they’ve got Clement Greenberg’s personal collection. (I would link to that on their web site, but there would be absolutely no point; there are no images there.) Noland was a favorite of old Clem.
These days, you hear much more about Cady Noland, Kenneth’s daughter, a difficult creature to pin down. In Miami she was a star of the Rubell Collection show (the one I griped about here). Triple Candie mounted a show of approximations of her works a few years back since the originals were so hard to come by. In writing about it Jerry Saltz opined:
Noland, not Barney, Hirst, or Gonzalez-Torres, is the crucial link between late-1980s commodity art and much that has followed; she is the portal through which enormous amounts of appropriational, political, and compositional notions pass. So mercurial, fierce, and originally poetic is she that I think of her as our Rimbaud.
Then, about a decade ago, for whatever reason, she absented herself. Noland hasn’t had a gallery or museum exhibition in more than 10 years. When her work turns up in group shows it is said that she tries to have it removed.
My images of the Nolands at the Rubells.
- Cady Noland, This Piece Has No Title Yet (1989), beer cans, flags, scaffolding, paint, and mixed media
- Noland’s gates piece at the Rubells.
Not art.
If it can be mistaken for wallpaper, then I wouldn’t call it art.
yeah, i hate it. condolences.
Whenever I see minimalism in art (or architecture) I think of Robert Venturi’s “Less is a bore” comeback to Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more.” It just doesn’t do much for me. Although, to some extent, it depends on the kind of minimalism. I’d guess Mark Rothko’s paintings would be considered minimalism and I like some of them.
If Less is More, then Nothing is Everything, and every Addition is only another Subtraction.
Every preschool in America pumps out work of a similar caliber every day.