How Kenneth Noland & Joan Mitchell Turn the Same Abstraction Into Opposite Worlds | Sotheby’s

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Two masterworks, >> Kenneth Nolan's circle and Joan Mitchell's [music] Loom 2.

[00:00:06]>> Two visions, >> one centrifugal, another boundless, >> one extraordinary moment in postwar abstraction.

[00:00:16]They are taking the same essential visual language and approaching it in [music] radically different ways.

[00:00:26]Radiating outwards with a hypnotic authority, Nolan's monumental circle from 1958 is among his earliest and most iconic target paintings. When you stand in front of the Nolan for the first time, you're almost overwhelmed by the scale. There was this centrifugal force.

[00:00:44]This painting that sucked you in, that enveloped you when you came up close to it. It was a really visceral, powerful experience and one unlike any I've had.

[00:00:54]>> Framing his tightly controlled circular bands, the cobalt and orange pull outwards, recalling the staining innovations of Helen [music] Frankenthaler who deeply influenced his practice. Nolan spoke about his target paintings, [music] the concentric circles, as quote oneshot paintings.

[00:01:12]There is no room for fallibility.

[00:01:14]There's no room [music] for error. If it goes wrong, then the work has to be abandoned. There is such an intensity, such a vitality to [music] these paintings that the term oneshot is uniquely appropriate. And this is that bullseye. For Mitchell, by contrast, there is a point of departure. And that point is not a strictly defined geometry or a form, but rather the landscape that surrounded her. In vetertoy at the time of this work's execution, >> punctuated by active staccato strokes of emerald and violet.

[00:01:44]>> It is as boundless as nature itself. And she is adopting the palette of her forebears of Claude Monet in these [music] paintings of water and of fields and of light and of trees and creating something divorced from all but inextricably linked to those natural phenomena.

[00:02:00]>> Possibly referring to the weaver paintings by Vincent Van Go. The title aligns her toll sweeping brush [music] strokes with the meditative repetition of a seamstress working thread by thread.

[00:02:15]>> Whereas the Noland envelops you, [music] the Mitchell has this almost indexicality. It's the size of a human [music] and it pulls your eyes upwards through all of these dancing flexcks of impasto through whites, through greens, through reds, through blues.

[00:02:31]Ultimately, these are two artists who are both playing variations on a theme.

[00:02:36]Noland, one that has been defined by these geometric forms that he's taking on. Mitchell through her fidelity and transcription of the landscape around her.

[00:02:47]>> These works are offered from the collection of Jennifer Gilbert to benefit Lumana, her forthcoming foundation at the heart of Detroit's little village. It's uniquely appropriate that these two paintings, both of which at the time of their execution [music] represented the apex of creativity, should be used to fund new projects by new artists working now in the 21st century.