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Two Columns 

paint-image, by identifying the thinned pigment with its woven canvas ground, as in Louis's work; it also allowed him to make the raw canvas itself work as optical space with unprecedented intensity. In a sense, the raw canvas in Noland's concentric-ring paintings of the late'50s and early '60s fulfills much the same function as the colored fields in Newman's large canvases around 1950; and, more generally, Noland in these paintings seems to have managed to charge the entire surface of the canvas with aa kinds of perceptual intensity which until that time only painters whose images took up most or all of the picture-field - Pollock, Still, Newman, Louis - had been able to achieve. 

The significance of the second difference between Noland's and Louis's paintings through about 1960- the fact that Noland's paint-images are precisely centered in square canvases and avoid making contact with the framing edge, while Louis' vertical images appear fairly casual about such contact- is perhaps not immediately apparent. It may seem at first that Louis, because of his willingness to run images off the canvas, was more concerned than Noland to derive or "deduce" pictorial structure from the literal character of the picture support. But I think this would be mistaken. Until 1961, when he made the "unfurl" paintings mentioned above, Louis' attitude toward the framing-edge seems to have been much the same as Pollock's and nowhere near as advanced as Newman's: that is, he appears to have made an image and then framed it so as to leave, if possible, a roughly symmetrical border of raw canvas around three sides of it. The exact shape and size of the picture-support was not a factor which determined the character of the paint-image, apart from giving it its generally vertical orientation. Noland, on the other hand, broke through to his mature style only when, in his words, he "discovered the center" of the canvas^6- that is, when he came to locate the central point of concentric or radiating motifs at the precise center of the square canvas- thereby relating his paint-images deductively to the shape, though not yet to the specific dimensions, of the picture support. In the lights of this "discovery" Noland's avoidance of the framing-edge in these early paintings may be seen to signify not indifference to the matter of deductive structure, but acute awareness that, given his own drive toward a deductive mode of pictorial organization- a drive that was (and still is) at bottom expressive in intent, having to do with the search for a set of formal constraints in which Noland himself could believe and under which his feelings could find release- making contact with the framing-edge would inevitably have raised more [[second column]] problems than he was prepared to cope with at that point. (Or perhaps it was that the developing logic of his feelings did not yet impel him to make contact with the framing-edge, whatever the problems.) This interpretation is reinforced by Noland's progressive elimination during these years of whatever was not absolutely essential to the lucid deductive structure toward which he seems to have aspired. Thus his eschewal of the last vestiges of traditional drawing and painterliness, such as the wavering armature motifs themselves and the ragged surges of color which sometimes appear as if cast forth by the rotation of the outermost concentric ring in his early picture; and thus also his increasingly explicit reliance on radical symmetry- often achieved by a very few narrow concentric rings of pale color, spaced rather widely apart, whose center is also the precise venter of the square canvas- for the determination of pictorial structure. 
But Noland has always been as much concerned with freedom as with formal constraint, and has constantly scrutinized his feelings. At the same time, he has constantly sought to evolve new formal solutions to the same basic problem of deductive structure, chiefly in order to achieve relations among colors of a kind precluded by the constraints implicit in previous solutions, but also in response to contemporary developments in modernist painting other than his own. And having explored with great resourcefulness the concentric-ring format described above, Noland seems to have come to feel that the rings could be replaced by rather compact ellipsoid motifs, their long axis parallel to the top and bottom of the picture support, as long as their location at the exact center of the square canvas was maintained. Shortly there after Noland appears to have decided that the elipsoid  motif could be moved somewhat above (or below for that matter) the center of the canvas without loosening the picture's structural logic- the elongation of the main motif along its own horizontal axis balancing, as it were, its spatial displacement along the central vertical axis of the painting, as well as making explicit the tension resulting from Noland's aspirations toward deductive structure between the shape of the motif and its placement in the picture-field.
This double departure from radical symmetry and concentricity had the important result of allowing Noland to juxtapose his motifs against a colored field much more effectively than in his concentric-ring paintings. Such a judgement is necessarily subjective, and may not agree with others' experience of the