Noland like many artists of the mid 20^th century attended college and studied painting on the G.I. Bill after World War II. He studied at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina not far from where he grew up. There he trained with and was influenced by geometric expressionist Ilya Bolotowsky (see Bolotowsky’s painting Blue Tondo in the Wichita Art Museum collection) and Josef Albers. He then went to Paris to continue his studies where he saw the works of Miró, Matisse, and Picasso.

By 1950 Noland was painting and teaching in Washington, DC where he would spend most of his career. In the wake of abstract expressionism’s meteoric rise, he began to move toward creating compositions with a clear center or focal point. He used hard-edged geometric shapes of bold color to create his paintings. He worked as a Color Field painter, using these simple flat shapes to explore color. Noland’s commitment to geometry and pure color was reflected throughout his career, some of this most recognizable works were of colored concentric circles or varying bands of chevron stripes.

This print is one of thirty prints by different active artists from the 1960s that were created as part of a portfolio of prints to be sold to help raise funds for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden so that the museum could purchase paintings and sculptures by those artists.  Some other artists featured in the portfolio were Robert Rauschenberg, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, and Louise Nevelson. The Wichita Art Museum’s copy of The New York Collection for Stockholm was a gift from Robert Rauschenberg who purchased and donated several of these portfolios to museums around the country.