Interview with Kenneth Noland (March 1989)

Paul Cummings: What kind of painting did you do at Black Mountain? How would you describe it?

Kenneth Noland: Well, it was abstract painting I guess of the Mondrian-Bauhaus type of painting but coming from the influence of Bolotowsky and Albers. Bolotowsky had closer affinities with Mondrian so we had the advantage of his experience. So my original education really had to do with abstract art right from the first ... at that time Bolotowsky and Albers were in the A.A.A. (American  Abstract Artists) ... They were a small group of artists but a group dedicated to the principles of abstract art. And at that time it wasn't a very popular activity. And so they had to be committed men. They did a great service for later generations.

PC: ...What was Paris like in those days? You had a studio there so you could work. Did you see lots of Americans? Did you get involved with French life?

KN: No, for some reason — I guess that was so close after the war that most of the American kind of stayed together. There wasn't very much communication back and forth with the French art students. I'm not sure exactly why but we didn't really get involved in French cultural life so much. Mostly we stayed together, most of the Americans did. And to me it was just that we had a different idea about art. I think we were willing to find out more about how art had been in Europe than being interested in like getting into it, as it were. We wanted to find out about the past more. We'd had the advantage of having had a lot of the best European artists that came to the United States. It was true at Black Mountain and it was also true in New York. Mondrian had been over here. We already knew that there had been work done by another generation of artists such as Pollock or even, say, the American Abstract Artists that somehow had absorbed a lot that had developed in Europe. So we weren't even that interested in, let's say, Picasso. We felt that it had been absorbed by an older generation, brought over here, and then picked up by the I generation abstract expressionists. We were aware of that. . . .

PC: When did you get to know [Louis]?

KN: Morris [Louis] was the first artist that I met in Washington [1952-53]. I knew a lot of the other artists but I had really become a close friend of Morris's mostly because our interest in art coincided. I felt an affinity with his preferences in art more than I did with most of the other artists in Washington that I knew. So we became painting buddies ...

PC: You mentioned that he was working with very similar ideas and things. How would you describe them?

KN: When I first met Morris he was very interested in Jackson Pollock, and so was I ... He had arrived at this independently. I had arrived at it mostly through having had contact with Clement Greenberg. There was idealism, personal idealism kind of involved in that. By checking and comparing and bringing other kinds of information to each other—for instance, we both liked
 Bob Motherwell's work. Which was kind of unique, I mean at that particular point. By
comparisons and by discussions and so forth it was mutually benefiting ...

PC: You mentioned Clem Greenberg. When did you meet him?

KN: I met Clem at Black Mountain College about 1950 or 1951 when he was there for a summer session. I found him a very interesting man right from the first. We've been very good friends ever since.

PC: [The] stained canvas ... Did this develop through Morris Louis?

KN: Actually it was through Pollock and from Pollock to Helen Frankenthaler and from Helen to me and Morris. Morris adapted it to his work first, I mean in relation to me he did. I was still experimenting around with all different kinds of paints. But he adapted that to his primary use first. That came from Pollock ...

PC: When did you start using tape? Do you find it gives you a different edge? More controlled?

KN: Well, it just made it simpler to use tape when I was making straight lines. Actually I began to use tape when I started making the horizontal stripe paintings ... if you've got enough material to use and can devise ways of working with it more quickly, that way you can get at the sense of what you want to do.

PC: But when you start do you have any idea of what the proportions are going to be? Or the length? Or the height? Or some kind of idea. Or is it just, you know, here is canvas and materials and away you go?

KN: When you're dealing with the problem of proportions, which I do,and you know how of different parts that you can use to make art, you're dealing with - you're in the problem of proportions. So you can be fairly arbitrary about at what point you start. You can take any given size and let that size set the conditions for other proportions in paintings. So it's not as if you have to plan it out. You're already in it, as it were, if you're in it...

PC: But it's still based on chance in a way, isn't it?

KN: It's based not so much on chance as on like juggling in a way. I mean you handle simultaneously a lot of factors, such as opacity of colour, transparency of colour, tactility, sheer quantity, scale, size; you're dealing with all those things thrown up in the air, as it were. And then the final result is where you bring all of those things into a certain accordance of size, shape, coolness, warmth, density, transparency ...

PC: So, abstract painting is more exploration of materials than outside subject matter, outside objects.

KN: In abstract painting there is some sense of the reality of the third dimension, you know, in terms of spatial distances, or coolness or warmth, or concreteness, or transparency, translucency, and so forth. Those are all different perceptual realities that kind of get into painting in a kind of emotionally expressive way ...

PC: One of the things that interests me again is the fact that there are so many shapes.

KN: There were chevron pictures that came before the diamond shapes. They were a step in between, I think that, you know, even though the pictures look different like there are circles, chevrons or diamonds, horizontal paintings, and so forth, I think generally the same preoccupations pertain in all the different kinds of pictures. When you play back and forth between the arbitrariness and the strictness of the conditions of making pictures it's a very delicate threshold back and forth ...

PC: You've also said that you don't really plan colours ahead and it's all, like juggling.

KN: But you can plan the conditions for colour ahead, as it were. I mean you can get together, you know, all the frame of reference that will get you into the condition of using colour in relation to shape, to size, to focus, to depth, to tactility. You can get all these things kind of together I guess probably akin to the way a composer gets his sounds together or something.

Excerpted from Paul Cummings, Unpublished interview recorded at the artist's studio, Dec. 9 and 21, 1971, Washington, D.C.: Archives of American Art. Revised by the artist, Mar. 1989.