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lustration of a particular formal idea. The self-criticism may in fact precede the painting--that is to say, the painter may sketch or otherwise determine a particular painting or series of paintings, and be able to put into words roughly what formal issues the projected work will deal with--but it very well may not. The precise constitution of the act of making the paintings, even if such could be determined, is not what matters. What matters is that the paintings themselves manifest a high degree of formal self-awareness; and this may come about, as often in Noland's work, as the result of (at least allegedly) intuitive decisions by the painter. Moreover, there is nothing certain or final about the particular formal development which Noland's paintings, or any other paintings for that matter, appear to follow. At another time, from another point of view, to eyes educated in a different world by different painting, radically different formal issues--or, conceivably, none at all--might appear to be at stake in his work. So that even if it were known precisely what Noland himself felt were the most important formal issues engaged with in his work, this would amount to nothing more than an extremely interesting historical fact, to be kept in mind and used, if necessary, as a kind of counterweight to how the paintings actually look.
How Noland's paintings actually look will be the subject of almost all the remainder of this essay. More exactly, I want to put forward an account of what seems to me the development of pictorial structure in Noland's work since the late 1950s--both in an attempt to make clear what sense he is a formal innovator of great resourcefulness, and in the hope that by giving an account of this development I will in effect be pointing at an aspect of his work roughly analogous to that of syntax in a verbal language: an aspect, that is, which has to do with how the colored elements in Noland's paintings are juxtaposed to one another with the result that they make sense, and which, if grasped, may increase the likelihood that a spectator not actively hostile to Noland's paintings will come to experience them as the powerful emotional statements I believe they are. The analogy at work here, between modernist painting and a verbal language, is drastically inexact and deeply problematic. But it is also potentially highly instructive, especially where it breaks down or threatens to break down, and I intend to pursue it further elsewhere.
Noland's first wholly individual paintings date from 1958-59. They are executed in a stain technique deriving ultimately from Pollock's black stain paintings of 1951 by way of Helen Frankenthaler; but an even more important source-- not so much of pictorial ideas as of reinforcement for his own growing convictions--seems to have been the then largely unappreciated work of another Washington painter, Morris Louis. Noland had known and admired Louis for several years, and in fact had brought him to New York in 1953 to meet Clement Greenberg. On that visit both painters saw a remarkable painting of Frankenthaler's, Mountains and Sea, for the first time; and on their return to Washington they determined to explore alternative possibilities to the Abstract Expressionist mode of painting then dominant in New York. For Louis, already in his forties, the experience seems to have been decisive. By 1954 he had succeeded in adapting Frankenthaler's stain technique--which in her hands has always retained a strong element of traditional drawing--to his own unique vision, founded on the eschewal of drawing, and had begun making paintings of astonishing beauty by staining acrylic paint into (for the most part) unsized canvas. This became Noland's technique as well, and in general it seems to have been the case that Louis' achievement gave important impetus to Noland's own breakthrough in the late 1950's. But it cannot be stated too emphatically that the exchange of impetus and inspiration that appears to have gone on between the two men up until Louis' death in 1962 at the height of his powers also appears to have been both fully mutual and mutually fructifying. 
Noland's paintings of the late 1950's differed from Louis' in at least two fundamental respects, apart from color. First, Noland tended to leave much more of the raw canvas untouched by the paint image than Louis, who preferred at that point to spread thin layers of pigment across most of the picture-field; and second, Noland favored a precisely centered image--either armature-like or, more usually, of concentric rings--which avoided making contact with the framing-edge, while Louis worked chiefly with vertically-oriented, veil-like images which often ran off the canvas along one at least of the framing-edges (generally the bottom). The first of these meant that from the start of his career as a modernist painter Noland was even more radical than Louis in his rejection of the packed, tactile space of de Kooning's kind of Abstract Expressionism. Moving toward an increasingly elliptical economy of means and effect, Noland made the raw canvas in his paintings function as an essential part of the overall image--something that does not quite occur in Louis' work until the splendid "unfurl" paintings of 1961, which may have come about partly in response to Noland's prior achievements in this vein. In other words, the stain technique not only ensured that opticality of Noland's