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Ellsworth Kelly (May 31, 1923 – December 27, 2015) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
There he developed his passion for form and color. John James Audubon had a particularly strong influence on Kelly's work throughout his career. Author Eugene Goossen speculated that the two- and three-color paintings (such as Three Panels: Red Yellow Blue, I 1963) for which Kelly is so well known can be traced to his bird watching and his study of the two- and three-color birds he saw so frequently at an early age. Kelly said he was often alone as a young boy and became somewhat of a "loner." He had a slight stutter that persisted into his teenage years.
He had become interested after reading a review of an Ad Reinhardt exhibit, an artist whose work he felt his work related to. Upon his return to New York, he found the art world "very tough." Although Kelly is now considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American art movement, it was hard for many to find the connection between Kelly's art and the dominant stylistic trends. In May 1956 Kelly had his first New York City exhibition at Betty Parsons' gallery. His art was considered more European than was popular in New York at the time. He showed again at her gallery in the fall of 1957. Three of his pieces: Atlantic, Bar, and Painting in Three Panels, were selected for and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibit, "Young America 1957". His pieces were considered radically different from the other twenty-nine artists’ works. Painting in Three Panels, for example, was particularly noted; at the time critics questioned his creating a work from three canvases. For instance, Michael Plante said that, more often than not, Kelly's multiple-panel pieces were cramped because of installation restrictions, which reduced the interaction between the pieces and the architecture of the room.
Kelly eventually moved away from Coenties Slip, where he had sometimes shared a studio with fellow artist and friend Agnes Martin, to the ninth floor of the high-rise studio/co-op Hotel des Artistes at 27 West 67th Street.Gwyneth Paltrow (October 13, 2011), Ellsworth Kelly profile, Interview website; accessed December 28, 2015.
Kelly left New York City for Spencertown in 1970 and was joined there by his partner, photographer Jack Shear, in 1984.Karen Wright (August 2012), The Artist's Studio: Ellsworth Kelly Vanity Fair; accessed December 28, 2015. From 2001 until his death Kelly worked in a 20,000-square-feet studio in Spencertown reconfigured and extended by the architect Richard Gluckman; the original studio had been designed by Schenectady-based architects Werner Feibes and James Schmitt in exchange for a site-specific painting Kelly created for them.[5]. Retrieved May 15, 2023. Kelly and Shear moved in 2005 to the residence they shared until the painter's death, a wood-clad Colonial house built around 1815. Shear serves as the director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. In 2015, Kelly gave his building design concept for a site of contemplation to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin. Titled Austin, the 2,715-square-foot stone building—which features colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture and black-and-white marble panels—is the only building Kelly designed and is his most monumental work.Blanton Museum of Art. Ellsworth Kelly's Austin. Retrieved April 5, 2019. Austin, which Kelly designed thirty years prior, opened in February 2018.Miller, M.H. "Ellsworth Kelly's Temple for Light," The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2018. Retrieved April 5, 2019.
Kelly died in Spencertown, New York on December 27, 2015, aged 92.
. Kelly was a pioneer of hard-edge painting in the 1940s and 1950s.]] Kelly's discovery in 1952 of Monet's late work infused him with a new freedom of painterly expression: he began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings. Ellsworth Kelly Fondation Beyeler; accessed December 28, 2015. As a painter he worked from then on in an exclusively abstract mode. By the late 1950s, his painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work of this period also provided a useful bridge from the vanguard American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and 1970s. Kelly's relief painting Blue Tablet (1962), for example, was included in the seminal 1963 exhibition, Toward a New Abstraction, at the Jewish Museum. Ellsworth Kelly: Relief Paintings, May 12 – June 29, 2001 , Matthew Marks Gallery website; accessed December 28, 2015.
During the 1960s he started working with irregularly angled canvases. Yellow Piece (1966), the artist's first shaped canvas, represents Kelly's pivotal break with the rectangular support and his redefinition of painting's figure/ground relationship. With its curved corners and single, all-encompassing color, the canvas itself becomes the composition, transforming the wall behind it into the picture's ground. Ellsworth Kelly: Singular Forms 1966–2009, April 18 – June 8, 2013, MnuchinGallery.com; accessed December 28, 2015.
In the 1970s he added curved shapes to his repertoire. Green White (1968) marks the debut appearance of the triangle in Kelly's oeuvre, a shape that reoccurs throughout his career; the painting is composed of two distinct, shaped monochromatic canvases, which are installed on top of each other: a large-scale, inverted, green trapezoid is positioned vertically above a smaller white triangle, forming a new geometric composition. Ellsworth Kelly Green White (1968) Phillips de Pury & Company New York, Contemporary Art Part 1, May 12, 2011.
After leaving New York City for Spencertown in 1970, he rented a former theater in the nearby town of Chatham, allowing to work in a studio more spacious than any he had previously occupied. After working there for a year, Kelly embarked on a series of 14 paintings that would become the Chatham Series. Each work takes the form of an inverted ell, and is made of two joined canvases, each canvas a monochrome of a different color. The works vary in proportion and palette from one to the next; careful attention was paid to the size of each panel and the color selected in order to achieve balance and contrast between the two. Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series, May 25 – September 8, 2013 Museum of Modern Art, New York.
A larger series of twelve works which Kelly started in 1972 and did not complete until 1983, Gray was originally conceived as an anti-war statement and is drained of color. Ellsworth Kelly: Gray 1975 – 77, May 12 – August 17, 2001 , Matthew Marks Gallery website; accessed December 28, 2015. In 1979 he used curves in two-colour paintings made of separate panels.
In later paintings, Kelly distilled his palette and introduced new forms. In each work, he started with a rectangular canvas which he carefully painted with many coats of white paint; a shaped canvas, mostly painted black, is placed on top. Ellsworth Kelly: Reliefs 2009–2010, February 12 – April 16, 2011 , Matthew Marks Gallery website; accessed December 28, 2015.
In reference to his own work Kelly said in an interview in 1996: "I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living. This an illusion, of course. Canvas rots. Paint changes color. But you keep trying to freeze the world as if you could make it last forever. In a sense, what I've tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing."
Kelly commented "I realized I didn't want to compose pictures … I wanted to find them. I felt that my vision was choosing things out there in the world and presenting them. To me the investigation of perception was of the greatest interest. There was so much to see, and it all looked fantastic to me."
He took up printmaking in a concerted fashion in the mid-1960s, when he produced his Suite of Twenty-Seven Lithographs (1964–66) with Maeght Éditeur in Paris. It was then that he created his first group of plant lithographs. From 1970 on he collaborated primarily with Gemini G.E.L. His initial series of 28 transfer lithographs, entitled Suite of Plant Lithographs, marked the beginning of a corpus that would grow to 72 prints and countless drawings of foliage. Plants, Flowers and Fruits: Ellsworth Kelly Lithographs: April 23, 2010, Norton Simon Museum; accessed December 28, 2015. In 1971, he completed four editions of prints and an edition of the multiple Mirrored Concorde at Gemini G.E.L. His Purple/Red/Gray/Orange (1988), at eighteen feet in length, may be the largest single-sheet lithograph ever made. Gemini G.E.L.: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1966–1996 – Ellsworth Kelly National Gallery of Art website; accessed December 28, 2015. His recent editions, The River, States of the River and River II, reflect the fascination with water Kelly possessed since his early days in Paris. Ellsworth Kelly Prints Created at Gemini Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. In 1975, Kelly was the first artist to exhibit for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art's MATRIX series. The exhibition displayed Kelly's Corn Stalk drawings series and two of his 1974 cor-ten steel sculptures.
In 1973 Kelly began regularly making large-scale outdoor sculpture. Kelly gave up painted surfaces, instead choosing unvarnished steel, aluminum or bronze, Ellsworth Kelly: Untitled (2005) Getty Center. often in totem-like configurations such as Curve XXIII (1981). While the totemic forms of his freestanding sculptures can measure up to 15 feet tall, his wall reliefs can span more than 14 feet wide. Kelly's sculpture "is founded on its adherence to absolute simplicity and clarity of form."Sims, Patterson and Emily Rauh Pulitzer. Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982. For his 1980s sculptures, during this period of his time in Spencertown, the artist devoted for the first time as much energy to his sculptures as to his painting, and in the process producing over sixty percent of his total 140 sculptures. Kelly created his pieces using a succession of ideas on various forms. He might have begun with a drawing, enhanced the drawing to create a print, taken the print and created a freestanding piece, which was then made into a sculpture. His sculptures are meant to be entirely simple and can be viewed quickly, often only in one glance. The viewer observes smooth, flat surfaces that are secluded from the space that surrounds them. This sense of flatness and minimalism makes it hard to tell the difference between the foreground and background. Kelly's Blue Disc was included in the seminal 1966 exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, Primary Structures, alongside many much younger artists just beginning to work with minimal forms.
Kelly's admiration for Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are apparent in his work. He trained himself to view things in various ways and work in different mediums because of their inspiration. Piet Mondrian influenced the nonobjective forms he used in both his paintings and sculptures. Kelly was first influenced by the art and architecture of the Romanesque art and Byzantine eras while he was studying in Paris. His introduction to Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism influenced his work and caused him to test the abstraction of geometric forms.
In 1990 Kelly curated the exhibition, "Artist's Choice: Ellsworth Kelly Fragmentation and the Single Form," at the Museum of Modern Art.
From 1984 until his death, Kelly lived with his husband, photographer Jack Shear, who serves as the director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.Homes, A.M., "With a new show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 89-year-old artist Ellsworth Kelly shows no signs of slowing down. A.M. Homes visits America's most prolific master" , WMagazine.com, July 2012; accessed December 28, 2015. Obituary, nytimes.com; accessed December 28, 2015.
Kelly's first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. His work has since been recognized in numerous retrospective exhibitions, including a sculpture exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982; an exhibition of works on paper and a show of his print works that traveled extensively in the United States and Canada from 1987–88; and a career retrospective in 1996 organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Since then, solo exhibitions of Kelly's work have been mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge (1999), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988/2002), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2007), and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007). Biography: Ellsworth Kelly Guggenheim Museum.
In 1993 the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris mounted the exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: The French Years, 1948–54," based on the artist's relationship with the city, which travelled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; in 2008, the Musée d'Orsay honored Kelly with the exhibition "Correspondences: Paul Cézanne Ellsworth Kelly". Ellsworth Kelly/Paul Cézanne, October 8, 2008 – February 1, 2009 Musée d'Orsay website; accessed December 28, 2015. Haus der Kunst exhibited the first comprehensive retrospective of Kelly's black and white works in 2012.David Rhodes (February 2012), Ellsworth Kelly/Schwarz-Weiss, BrooklynRail.org; accessed December 28, 2015.
On the occasion of the artist's 90th birthday in 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington mounted an exhibition of his prints; the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia put together five sculptures in a show; the Phillips Collection in Washington exhibited his panel paintings; and the Museum of Modern Art opened a show of the "Chatham Series".Carol Vogel (April 25, 2013), "Galleries Celebrate Ellsworth Kelly at 90", The New York Times; accessed December 28, 2015.
Kelly's work was acquired by the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, through a large donation from the Holding Capital Group, and exhibited as part of B eyond the Limited Life of Painting: Prints and Multiples from the Holding Capital Group Collection, in 2014 and 2015. In 2024, PAMM is again including Kelly's work in Every Sound Is a Shape of Time: Selections from PAMM's Collection.
A retrospective entitled "Ellsworth Kelly at 100" was organized in 2023 by the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, and was scheduled to travel to Paris and
In 2013 Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned the work "Spectrum VIII" (completed in 2014) a large-scale multi-panel painting serving as curtain for the Auditorium designed by Frank Gehry at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris. See "Ellsworth Kelly", Francesca Pietropaolo ed., Cahiers de la Fondation, no.1, (Paris: Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2014).
Kelly's two-paneled Blue Black (2001), 28 feet tall and made of painted honeycomb aluminum, was commissioned for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Collection and the large-scale bronze Untitled (2005) was commissioned specifically for the courtyard of the Phillips Collection. In 2005, Kelly was commissioned with the only site-specific work for the Modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago by Renzo Piano. He created White Curve, the largest wall sculpture he has ever made, which is on display since 2009.Carol Vogel (April 16, 2009), Inside Art: The Art Institute of Chicago add more works by Ellsworth Kelly The New York Times. Kelly installed Berlin Totem, a 40 feet stainless-steel sculpture, in the courtyard of the Embassy of the United States, Berlin, in 2008.Gareth Harris (April 28, 2014), Artists await call-up as new US Embassy in London arises The Art Newspaper.
In 1986 Kelly conceived his first free-standing building for a private collector, but it was never realized. Only in 2015, the Blanton Museum of Art acquired his design for a 2,715-square-foot stone building, including 14 black-and-white marble panels and colored glass windows, planning to build it on the museum's grounds at the University of Texas, Austin.Robin Pogrebin (February 5, 2015), Texas Museum to Build Ellsworth Kelly Design The New York Times. The building was opened to the public February 18, 2018. A work of art and architecture, Austin, is deemed the culmination of Kelly's career.
Kelly was commissioned to create a large outdoor sculpture in 1968 for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY. The sculpture titled Yellow Blue was inspired by the Empire State Plaza setting, and is Kelly's largest standing sculpture at nine feet high and nearly sixteen feet across. Yellow Blue
Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany NY
Kelly has also received numerous honorary degrees, among others from Bard College (1996), Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Royal College of Art, London (1997); Harvard University, Cambridge (2003); and Williams College (2005). Commencement 2005: Honorary Degree Citation Williams College.
In 2014 Kelly's painting Red Curve (1982) sold at auction for $4.5 million at Christie's New York. Ellsworth Kelly, Red Curve (1982), Christie's New York, Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale, May 13, 2014 That auction record for a work by Ellsworth Kelly was set by the 13-part painting Spectrum VI (1969), which sold for $5.2 million at Sotheby's New York, Contemporary Art Evening sale, November 14, 2007.Colin Gleadell, Sotheby's Scores Its Highest-Ever $316M Contemporary Auction ARTnews, November 26, 2007.
In Nov 2019, Christie's set an auction record for the artist with the work Red Curve VII, sold for a $9.8million.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture on the Wall Barnes Foundation exhibition catalogue, 2013
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