Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Noland

There is a quiet power move in Noland's phrasing: he frames influence not as a trendy lineage but as a precedent, something closer to jurisprudence than inspiration. David Smith, the American sculptor who started welding industrial materials into fiercely original forms in the early 1930s, gets cast here as the person who made later freedom thinkable. Noland isn’t simply praising a forebear; he’s staking a claim for his own generation of postwar American artists by locating their permission slip in Smith’s early decisions.

The line “as time goes on” matters. It suggests that Smith’s importance didn’t register as a clean, immediate revelation. It accrues. That’s a familiar story in modern art: the work that looks “obvious” in hindsight often looked like misbehavior when it arrived. Noland, a key figure in Color Field painting, speaks from inside a culture that loved to mythologize sudden revolutions (Abstract Expressionism as Year Zero). His retrospective tone gently resists that myth. The real break, he implies, began earlier, in the 30s, when Smith was already treating steel like a drawing medium and collapsing distinctions between studio art and the machine age.

“Many of us” is the other tell. Noland is building a collective memory, a shared ancestry for artists who came up amid the dominance of painting but were haunted by sculpture’s physical candor. He’s also signaling humility with strategy: by crediting Smith as precedent-setter, Noland reframes later breakthroughs as part of a longer American modernism - less heroic lone-genius, more relay race.