One on One: Ellsworth Kelly’s Colors for a Large Wall

Today Kelly is celebrated for his unique investigations of shape and color. Unique because his famed canvases of bold flat color presented in simple geometries stood, when they first appeared in the early 1950s, in stark contrast to the reigning approach of Abstract Expressionism, with its gestural strokes and dripped paint said to express the interiority of their maker. Unique because even when his seemingly simple shapes seemed to rhyme with the streamlined forms of Minimalism in the 1960s, Kelly’s approach had a very different motivation. His singular vision was rooted in close, empirical observation of the world. Whether the tile pattern in the shower, the outline of trees against a bright sky, or a multihued sign on the street, Kelly mined everyday shapes and colors as the raw material for his paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. Learning from Kelly how humble elements in our environment can be transformed—the area under a bridge and its reflection in the water become an eye-catching geometry of two joined arcs; shadows from a metal staircase yield a panorama of jagged angled lines—pays enormous dividends to his viewers, encouraging what the artist calls “eye-work.”⁴ It is indeed work to notice these patterns, fragments, and forms, but it is a labor of generosity and an openness to the potential and possibilities of the built and natural worlds, work that is its own reward.

An artist of the same generation as Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg, Kelly insisted that “all artists have to learn how to see.”⁵ Much of his learning, his journey to maturity as an artist, occurred in France, between 1948 and 1954. After two years at art school in Boston, he took advantage of the GI Bill to return to Paris, which he had first seen as a soldier in 1944, shortly after the Liberation.⁶ Ultimately, Kelly’s education in seeing resulted in a rupture with traditions of artmaking both old and new and led to his breakthrough painting Colors for a Large Wall (1951). This is the story of that painting.

Kelly’s dismissal of invention was, paradoxically, articulated during what was for him an extraordinarily inventive period: a time defined by the development of a series of approaches to making art that would ultimately define his entire career. Colors for a Large Wall, completed in December 1951, three years after his visit to Colmar, is the capstone of that moment. Not only the largest work that Kelly made up until that time, it also fully encompassed the artist’s new language and methods. Colors is constructed from sixty-four square panels that together form an almost eight-by-eight-foot square. Each panel is painted flatly and exactingly—completely devoid of gesture—in one of fourteen colors. An armature on the work’s back joins and secures the panels, but Kelly wants us to observe that the work is constructed from multiple elements, and, to that end, the junctions between each square are clearly visible. As for the work’s colors, sometimes white panels are adjacent, but there is no adjacency among any of the other hues, whether in the checkerboard’s vertical, horizontal, or diagonal vectors. As we look at the entire work or examine it part by part, from one color to the next, no recognizable pattern is discernible, making it seem that the panels could be easily rearranged at will, a game offered up for our pleasure. This is not the case, however. Once Kelly settled on this order—via a collage study—it was set. No rearranging. And just as the title of the work refers to it being made “for a large wall,” the work is enveloping, filling our visual field with dynamic colorful rhythm, a syncopation that feels almost musical in its bounce and beat.

In describing Colors for a Large Wall and his approach to creating it, Kelly explains less what it is than what it isn’t, what he refused to do: “I was deciding what I didn’t want in a painting, and just kept throwing things out—like marks, lines, and the painted edge.”¹⁰ Figuration, emotion, depiction, gesture, composition, reason also ended up in the trash heap. How, then, did a move against creativity, against invention, against reason, against an “autographic, gestural ‘self,’”¹¹ yield one of the greatest works of the postwar period?