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PARTISAN REVIEW
Guston's late "cartoon-image" paintings have attracted a great deal
of attention. Among other things, they have been appropriated as indi–
cations of the failure of abstraction, so that it is doubly important to be
reminded of just how potent an abstract painter he was. For one thing,
it is obvious that whether he used recognizable images or not, the
painterly issues - touch, layering, edge, materiality - were of primary im–
portance to Guston and crucial to the emotional impact of his art. For
another, the seriousness and intensity of the best pictures at McKee af–
firmed that far from being evidence of a rupture within Guston's work,
his late paintings simply made explicit things that had been implicit all
along.
The quirky miniature Kenneth Noland retrospective at Castelli's
West Broadway space provided another opportunity to look freshly at a
painter too frequently identified by only a fragment of his achievement.
By omitting any of the signature Stripe paintings and concentrating in–
stead on works that revealed the continuing importance of shape, inter–
val, and scale to Noland's efforts, the show encouraged reconsideration
of his development from the late fifties to the present. The painter, ac–
claimed primarily as a colorist, has often spoken of his preoccupation
with things other than color; he values highly, for example, works that
have what he calls multiple "scales," whose interior structure can be read
in more than one way, depending on the viewer's relationship to the
work. I suspect that for most of his admirers, Noland's ravishing orches–
trations of color have simply eclipsed the importance of other concerns
to the success of his pictures - of extension, shape, and expanse, among
other things. This is not to discount the role of chroma in Noland's
pictures, but rather to stress the interdependence of color and other
considerations.
The show made its point by juxtaposing a pair of rather atypical
Circles from the early years of his career with a group of subtly colored,
irregularly shaped canvases from the 1970s - tall, narrow surfboards and
wide, spreading paintings with radiating "fans" of color - and a small
selection of recent constructed pictures. It became clear that the recent
works, built of disparate shaped elements assembled almost like bas reliefs,
evolved logically from the earlier works, with each painted element, at
first differentiated chiefly by hue and expanse, then by variations in tex–
ture, now assuming an almost independent material presence. Noland
remains a subtle, unpredictable colorist, but in his newest works, each
zone of color exists as a separate physical entity, while its real, literal
form
IS ,
In
turn , altered by shifts of sprayed tone and
