Kenneth Noland was a leading American Color Field painter. His interest in working with flat colors developed into a fixation with simple shapes like chevrons, stripes, and bullseyes. Noland’s hallmark technique of staining unprimed canvas arose from his interactions with Morris Louis, Clement Greenberg, and Helen Frankenthaler. The late critic Hilton Kramer once wrote of Noland, “An art of this sort places a very heavy burden on the artist’s sensibility for color, of course—on his ability to come up, again and again, with fresh and striking combinations that both capture and sustain our attention, and provide the requisite pleasures.” Born on April 10, 1924,​ in Asheville, NC, Noland was a veteran of World War II and took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study at the Black Mountain College, where he learned color theory from Josef Albers and became interested in the paintings of Paul Klee. Noland would go on to represent the United States in the 1964 Venice Biennale, and over the following decades, continued to experiment with the same forms for which he was known. Noland died in Port Clyde, ME on January 5, 2010. Today, and his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.