He had four siblings: David, Bill, Neil, and Harry Jr.[1][2] Noland enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1942 after completing high school.

[6] In the early 1950s, Noland met Morris Louis in D.C. while teaching night classes at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts.

His preoccupation with the relationship of the image to the containing edge of the picture led him to a series of studies of concentric rings or bullseyes, commonly called targets, which, like the one reproduced here—Beginning (1958)—used unlikely color combinations.

In 1964, he was included in the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction curated by Clement Greenberg,[8] which traveled the country and helped to firmly establish color field painting as an important new movement in contemporary art of the 1960s.

Noland pioneered the shaped canvas, initially with a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical diamonds or chevrons.

He emphasized spatial relationships in his work by leaving unstained, bare canvas as a contrast against the colors used throughout his paintings.

[23] Noland died of kidney cancer at his home in Port Clyde, Maine, on January 5, 2010, at the age of 85.

Noland's final solo exhibition, Kenneth Noland Shaped Paintings 1981–82, opened on October 29, 2009, at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on East 68th Street in New York City and was scheduled to close on January 9, 2010 (though the closing date was later extended to January 16).