• MoMA, Floor 4, 416 The David Geffen Galleries

The works that Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) created over his six-decade career feature economic lines, reduced geometries, and uninterrupted planes of color. They appear strikingly simple yet embody a semblance of ease that conceals the effort and experimentation involved in producing them. Kelly’s sketchbooks—which largely remained private throughout the artist’s lifetime—reveal the particularities of his unique process. Their pages hint at the real-world references that often inspired his seemingly non-objective compositions.

This gallery celebrates the centennial of Kelly’s birth and includes several works that came to MoMA as gifts of Jack Shear, including 25 of the artist’s sketchbooks. A selection of them are shown with related drawings and paintings. In automatic drawings he let his pencil flow freely. In multicolor grids he similarly harnessed the possibilities of chance while arranging squares of paper. And in collages of flat color, he chose shapes that he adopted from “out there in the world”—transforming passing impressions into an art of ideals.

Organized by Samantha Friedman, Associate Curator, with Danielle Johnson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.

19 works online
Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].