Beginning in 1958, Kenneth Noland's paintings were seen as the embodiment of Color Field painting. His staining technique reduced the surface of his paintings to a revolutionary degree of unity with the canvas, and along with Morris Louis and Jules Olitski, Noland was championed by Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic on the scene at that time and the arbiter of advanced painting theory. Noland's all-over compositions, influenced by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, fulfilled his ambition of eliminating Cubist-based structure:

To organize an abstract painting, Noland believed that it was necessary to reject Cubist structure, which was essentially graphic and based on light and dark which even Mondrian had been unable to discard. His ambition was to transform a graphic structure into a color structure, with Matisee and Klee his masters (D. Waldman, Kenneth Noland, New York 1977, p. 13).

The Target series has long been recognized as Noland's most successful attainment of his goals, and one of the seminal achievements of Post-War American painting. From 1958 through 1962, Noland continually experimented with color, technique and variations on the circle. Noland's early targets often use a free-hand brushing in one of the concentric rings; in Course, this representation of centrifugal color energy is utilized throughout the painting, with eight concentric bands in brilliant, saturated hues heightening the dramatic power of the painting to the highest degree while maintaining the all-over unity of the motif. Later works from the series are cooler, with less expressionist brushwork, and are often recognized as precursors of the Minimalist aesthetic of the 1960s.