Painting: Bold Emblems

For roughly a decade, the works of a slight, wiry, North Carolina-born painter named Kenneth Noland, 45, have been vehemently praised and just as savagely dissected in art magazines, while remaining relatively unappreciated by the general museum going public. The reason is that Noland's paintings, from the time he first began to attract attention with his "target" canvases of 1957, have remained icily symmetrical, uncompromisingly abstract, and thus seemingly impersonal. The debate has raged over whether (as his foes charged) they are merely decorative, or whether (as his friends claimed) they are simply so difficult that most people do not bother to grapple with them.

In the past few years, however, Noland's reputation seems to have widened amazingly. His latest work, marked by a softer, subtler spectrum of colors, and currently on view at Manhattan's Lawrence Rubin Gallery, is so much in demand that the gallery is charging up to $28,500 per painting. The artist himself and his svelte wife Stephanie can afford to divide their time between a farm in Vermont and Manhattan, where he recently bought and is renovating a flophouse on the Bowery. Noland's style has been studied and imitated by fellow artists from Rome to British Columbia. Advertisements are apt to blossom with his latest hues a season after he unveils them, because Madison Avenue's art directors haunt the 57th Street galleries for fresh ideas.

Freeing Color. To hear the artist tell it, the most interesting thing about his painting is the way in which it "liberates color." The son of a pathologist, he was educated at Black Mountain College, where he studied under another symphonist of structured color, Josef Albers. He became disenchanted with the way in which second-generation Abstract Expressionists were covering their canvases with empty, bombastic gestures. The trouble, he decided, was that they were using their brushes to draw, and "drawing contains assumptions of what you are painting about. It has to do with identifying things, with graphic representation."

Noland did not want to identify anything, or to represent anything. His aim was to strip away the bonds of drawing and free himself to explore "the infinite range and expressive possibilities of color." To do this, he laid a 6-ft. square of canvas on the floor and walked around it until he lost track of its top and bottom. He decided that the "most neutral" place to start from was its center, and proceeded to pour, stain and swab paint in concentric circles outward. Noland played with half a dozen colors in such target paintings, devising hundreds of dashing combinations. He moved on to chevrons, then to diamond-shaped canvases. Since 1967, he has been painting majestically flowing, horizontally striped rectangles that enable him to orchestrate as many as 30 different shades at a time.