KAREN WILKIN
149
1960s, remain some of the freshest, most radiant pictures ever painted in
the United States. That was apparent from the first, but the wonderfully
selected, impeccably installed exhibition makes clear that they are also
some of the most intelligent (and intuitive) paintings made anywhere.
Seeing the evolution of the motif, from the first loose, rather dense pic–
tures of the series to the pristine, clean-edged, spare pictures of the 1960s,
is like seeing a metaphor for the creation of order out of chaos. Noland
turns the inchoate stuff of painting into inevitable- seeming, rational,
symmetrical wholes. What's surprising is how painterly the
Circles
seem,
these days, how much about the hand as well as the eye. The show em–
phasizes the range of Noland's invention, the significance he is able to
extract from changes in interval, spacing, edge, density and more . But the
most overwhelming aspect of these paintings is, of course, their extraordi–
nary singing color, their unexpected harmonies of hues we are sure we
have never seen before that at the same time remind us of all kinds of
precedents in art and nature without literally recapitulating or describing
any of them. The show is accompanied by a handsome catalogue with an
excellent essay by Agee. The color reproductions don't come up to the
real thing, but then, what could?
Coming in
Partisan R eview
• An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler
• Jacob Weisberg on Holocaust Studies
• Irving Louis Horowitz on Contemporary Sociology
•After the Polish Elections
by Aleksander Smolar
• Modern Document: Thomas Mann
•
Thomas Bernhard's Austria
by Steve Dowden
• Eugene Goodheart on Postmodernism
• James Olney on Richard Wright
