Audio Description (01:28)

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Kenneth Noland’s Lebron is a six-foot by six foot-square acrylic painting on canvas. It shows a giant white circle with three geometric shapes inside–each a different color, centered, nested and aligned. A light-olive, oblong oval, first inside, spans the giant circle horizontally, but for a margin at either side. Spanning the oval, but for a margin, is a sky-blue rectangle with rounded corners. Last, at the center, like a bullseye, is a dark-gray-colored circle. 

Noland painted Lebron in 1962. The sky-blue and dark-gray colors have a very faintly dappled, water-color-quality which is less noticeable in the light-olive and the white. Behind and around the giant white circle, Noland has left the dull beige surface of the canvas unpainted. A slender border of bare canvas also encircles the oval.  

Lebron could bring to mind an eye–similarly to the logo for CBS: Its central bullseye suggests an iris, and its oblong oval suggests the opening between the lids of an open eye. Except in Lebron: No white appears within this opening, and the bullseye appears inside an oblong sky-blue rectangle.  

The absence of an obvious intention or synergy in the arrangement of shapes and muted colors distinguishes Lebron seemingly from a logo or a symbol–and so does the involvement of unpainted canvas. Noland composed it perhaps to discover the result–and because it was unobvious.