Sailboat with brown sky

Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), the influential American abstract artist, whose Colour Field paintings of the 1950s and 1960s became the successor for the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, was the most recent owner of this work. He first gained recognition in the 1950s for his series of circle paintings, in which he painted simple geometric forms using pure colour. His achievements were recognised in a major retrospective held in 1971 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and more recently in an exhibition of his 1960s Stripe Paintings at Tate, Liverpool, in 2006. His work is in many major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate, London.