Noland was a key member of the Washington Color School, a group of abstract painters based in Washington, D.C., who emerged in the late-1950s and flourished to great acclaim in the 1960s.
Many of the artists had been included in Clement Greenberg’s Post-painterly Abstraction exhibition in 1964 alongside likeminded artists such as Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler and Sam Francis, yet it was the 1965 exhibition The Washington Color Painters that traveled from the now defunct Washington Gallery of Modern Art to such institutions as the Walker Art Center which truly cemented the group’s reputation. While the exhibition included the work of Noland, Morris Louis, Paul Reed, Howard Mehring, Thomas Downing, and Gene Davis, the broader Washington Color School also came to encompass artist such as Sam Gilliam and Alma Thomas.
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Cover of the exhibition catalogue The Washington Color Paintings, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., 1965.
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United by an emphasis on color and a keen sense of experimentation, these artists represented a cool and reduced aesthetic that served as a counterpoint to the New York School. Rejecting the painterly gestures and heavily worked surfaces of Abstract Expressionism, many of the Washington Color School artists embraced novel painting techniques that both elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color Field painting. The “soak stain” method that Frankenthaler had pioneered in the early 1950s served as a model for many of these artists in their pursuit of exploring the materiality of painting. Noland, along with Louis, was among the first to learn of her novel technique when Clement Greenberg introduced them to her work during a studio visit in 1953.
Greenberg considered these color fields as the purest form of modern painting: effectively opening up the possibilities of Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip technique, the stain technique enabled a “purely optical” experience of painting. The semi-transparent expanses of variegated color that stain the canvas weave draw attention to the flatness of the picture plane, freeing it from the shackles of illusory, pictorial space and instead emphasizing it as a literal, physical surface. The object-nature of painting was further expanded upon by Noland, as well as Sam Gilliam, in their radical reconsideration of the very shape and structure of the canvas itself.