Ellsworth Kelly. Colors for a Large Wall. 1951. Oil on canvas, 64 panels, 7' 10 1/2" × 7' 10 1/2" (240 × 240 cm). Gift of the artist

“I feel that the freedom of colors in space is very much what I’ve always been involved in.”

Ellsworth Kelly

In 1951, the 28-year-old artist Ellsworth Kelly submitted a grant to the Guggenheim Foundation, proposing “an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements, aiming to establish a new scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, providing a way for painting to accompany modern architecture.” Though the application was rejected, the project came to fruition in the series of drawings known as Line Form Color. Kelly’s six-decade career constituted just such a repertory of plastic forms, investigated across works on paper, painting, and architecturally sensitive sculpture.

Born in Newburgh, New York, Kelly served in the military during World War II, allowing him to study art in Boston and Paris on the GI Bill through the mid-to-late 1940s. In Paris, he absorbed the lessons of Byzantine icons and Romanesque frescoes, Jean Arp’s experiments with chance and Henri Matisse’s economical line, all of which helped him develop his own artistic language. Rather than composing, he began “choosing things out there in the world and presenting them,” adopting the forms of a window, some awnings, or the shadows of a staircase, and offering them as apparent abstractions.1 The result was a language both personal (keyed to Kelly’s particular eye) and universal (presented without alteration or comment).

Upon returning to New York in 1954, and settling two years later in the downtown Coenties Slip community of artists that included Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, Agnes Martin, and Lenore Tawney, Kelly deepened his exploration of dimensionality and expanded his scale. In a painting like Two Blacks, White and Blue, in which each hue in the title corresponds to a discrete panel, color and construction become one. And in an installation like the 65-foot, painted aluminum Sculpture for a Large Wall, commissioned for the lobby of Philadelphia’s Transportation Center, he was able to work in a truly architectural mode, scaling the work to its site.

In 1970, Kelly moved into the Spencertown, New York, farmhouse that would remain his primary residence for the rest of his life. His first series of paintings executed in upstate New York was the Chatham Series—named for the nearby town in which he made them in a spacious former-theater-turned-studio. For these human-scaled inverted ells, each composed of two joined panels, Kelly spoke of concentrating on “the space between the picture and the viewer,” emphasizing relationships not only within the work, but beyond it.2 This particular combination of simple forms was both new to his repertory as well as an organic extension of the rudiments proposed in Line Form Color decades before—a testament to the simultaneous consistency and innovation of his lifelong project.

Samantha Friedman, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2021

Note: opening quote is from Anna Somers Cocks, “Interview with Ellsworth Kelly: ‘The freedom of colours in space,’” The Art Newspaper, May 31, 2008. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/2008/06/01/interview-with-ellsworth-kelly-the-freedom-of-colours-in-space.

  1. Holland Cotter, “A Giant of the New Surveys His Rich Past,” The New York Times, October 13, 1996: H43.

  2. Conversation between Ann Temkin and the artist, moma.org: https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/266/3437.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
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.
Wikidata
Q544899
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
American abstract painter worked with large forms of luminous color, often on shaped canvases.
Nationality
American
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Graphic Artist, Painter, Sculptor
Name
Ellsworth Kelly
Ulan
500004975
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

337 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • Ellsworth Kelly: Colors for a Large Wall Paperback, 48 pages
  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Being Modern: Building the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 288 pages
  • Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 72 pages
  • Ellsworth Kelly Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, pages
  • Ellsworth Kelly Exhibition catalogue, Clothbound, pages
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