Peacock Duo

The minority opinion among critics at last summer's Venice Biennale was that the top prize should have gone to a U.S. painter who is far from pop. He is Kenneth Noland, whose work, along with that of his stylistic comrade, the late Morris Louis, was presented in the official U.S. exhibit as an alternate direction to that taken by Prizewinner Robert Rauschenberg (TIME, Sept. 18) and Jasper Johns (TIME, Dec. 4).

The decorative appeal of Louis' and Noland's work, especially for European critics, is not hard to understand. Compared to the beer cans, taxidermic delights, and other hairy intrusions of other new art, their art is clean, almost scrubbed raw. Without resorting to optical ping-pong, they soak pure peacock color into huge, unprimed, raw canvas. With all the flamboyant color that today's plastic paints can provide, their works please some as wall hangings, avant-garde tapestries aglow with unconventional color combinations and quite uncomplicated by symbolism.

Sherbet-Soft Colors. The problem is that Louis and Noland are pioneer explorers who need vast spaces to give their quest a sense of achievement. Even the best tapestry would be ridiculous as a doily, and their Cinemascopic canvases only achieve their effect when they engulf the viewer's vision. Their works often run from baseboard to ceiling and as wide as 18 ft. This large format must impose itself like a looming display of northern lights to achieve a scale that inflames the imagination.

Louis and Noland, often paired because they worked together in Washington, began to gain recognition as the heyday of the abstract expressionists passed. In contrast to the abstract expressionists' frenzy of free-swinging brushstrokes, Morris Louis, who died suddenly two years ago at the age of 50, turned out paintings in which any trace of imagery or personality disappeared into cool, lush fields of color. With his sherbet-soft spectrum, Louis made floral-petal shapes and stripes like awnings that left yawning, bare canvas between them.

Kenneth Noland, 40, who studied with Abstractionists Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, produces work that is harder edged, but his thinly applied geometries was not immediately popular. Noland's first two one-man shows, in 1956 and 1957, went untouched. But by 1959 the tide had changed. In the past year, five major museums have bought his canvases, and today he commands prices averaging $4,500.

Disneyland Chevrons. Noland rarely paints smaller than 4 ft. by 4 ft. Yet he does not want machinelike perfection. "I'm a one-shot painter," he says, and in his Bridge he deliberately left the splatter of orange on yellow. Noland dares to parallel magenta, russet, beige and maroon in a lollipop war of taste. Sometimes he rams and jams his bright color bands into asymmetrical chevrons like a Disneyland sergeant gone askew.

By their very size, such paintings beg to cover architecture in a manner more decorative than declarative. Their appeal is their eye-teasing chromatic charm. There is no texture in their matte surfaces, and no recognizable image. But in an age that sees too much by reproduction, these two artists believe in a search for highly visible experiences that cannot be duplicated. "I do open paintings," says Noland. "I like lightness, airiness, and the way color pulsates. The presence of the painting is all that's important."

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