Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [131]
Albers’s own work reflected such extreme discipline. From the 1950s he concentrated on variations of the most neutral, stable form he could find: the square. His Homage to the Square series consists of superimposed squares of subtly varied hues, a textbook demonstration of how colors interact. Albers wanted his viewer to be aware of “an exciting discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect of color” — the optical illusion of color.
NOLAND: ON TARGET. Kenneth Noland (b. 1924), an American pupil of Albers, learned his color lessons well. But instead of squares, he first specialized in concentric circles. By confining himself to the circle (called his “target” paintings, begun in 1958), Noland established the center of the canvas (the “bull’s eye”) as a structuring device, forcing the viewer to focus on other formal elements. “With structural considerations eliminated,” he said, “I could concentrate on color.”
By the mid-‘60s, Noland moved on to another trademark shape: immense, brightly colored chevrons. In traditional composition, forms cohere around a central focal point, but in Noland’s, the wing-shaped chevrons seem to fly off toward the canvas edge. Noland also defied tradition by breaking the picture’s rectangular format. A pioneer of the shaped canvas, he used diamonds, triangles, and irregular shapes.
Noland attempted to erase his personal identity from his canvases by the use of controlled designs, intense colors, and geometric compositions he called “self-cancelling,” rather than “self-declaring.” Instead of screaming “Look at me!” to draw attention to an artist’s inner vision as in Abstract Expressionism, up-front Hard Edge paintings quietly state, “Look for yourself.” It was not about interior angst, only exterior surface.
Noland, “Bend Sinister,” 1964, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Noland divided space with sharply defined shapes and colors to evoke calculated visual sensations.
KELLY: PERFORMING MASSES. More than a brush, the tools of the Hard Edge painter’s trade are quick-drying acrylic paint and masking tape for clear, crisp outlines. American artist Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923) outlined his shapes so sharply, they looked like razor cuts. Yet he claimed, “I’m not interested in edges.... I want the masses to perform.”
And perform they do. Kelly combines giant, simple shapes so they almost oscillate. The viewer is hard put to say which is forefront and which is background. In some of his paintings, a large shape seems barely confined within the canvas, while in others the image seems to continue outside the picture frame. In both cases, Kelly sets up a fluctuating tension between static/dynamic and closed/open forms. In “Blue, Red, Green,” the cut-off, irregular blue ellipse slices across a green rectangle like a water hazard on a putt-putt course. The green form seems both a flat plane and a slightly receding background.
Kelly also used shaped canvases in irregular, geometric, and curved formats. He typically combined two bold, intense colors and basic shapes in mural-sized canvases.
Kelly, “Blue, Red, Green,” 1962-63, MMA, NY. Hard Edge painters used simple forms and limited colors in precise, impersonal designs.
STELLA: MECHANICAL DRAWING. One of the most original of contemporary American artists is Frank Stella (b. 1936). Stella insists on the painting as a self-sufficient object. “All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them,” Stella said, “is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.”
Stella first established his identity with a series of black-striped paintings consisting of sooty pinstripes separated by narrow white bands. Breaking the rectangle with shaped canvases was a way for him to overcome the illusion that a painting is a window into illusionistic space. Instead of traditional easel paintings that told a story, made a “statement,” or presented a metaphor for