Centennial Celebration: Ellsworth Kelly’s Infinite Ideas

It is easy to forget, when beholding Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, reliefs, or sculptures, that many of these works—large and confident, with purposefully impersonal surfaces—began with the slightest of passing perceptions or the humblest of ideas. That forms which seem ineluctable arose from inklings or observations and were coaxed toward their ultimate ends through careful modification and continual fine-tuning. Kelly’s collages, with their imperfect edges and touches of remnant glue, are one reminder of the origins of much of the artist’s grander output; they evoke that special tenderness that can accompany geometry when it is ever so slightly idiosyncratic. His drawings are another: a stray mark, the quiver in a line, a doubling back or an erasure, all attest to the particular human mind that, through a series of incremental decisions, arrives at a result whose aim is to downplay its own mechanics. In Kelly’s sketchbooks—to which he turned constantly, and kept mostly private, throughout his long career—we see even more evidence of the protracted thought, extended inquiry, and perpetual investigation of which there is little sign in the apparently (but only apparently) preordained presences of his eventual achievements.

Sketchbook #26 is a standard-issue Strathmore Alexis Drawing pad—eleven by fourteen inches, with a coiled wire binding—the first such product that the company introduced, in 1950.¹ Kelly filled eighteen of its pages (thirty-six if you count front and back) of white, wove, medium-weight paper, between 1954 and 1956, his first two years in New York, after six spent in France.² He was living and working in a studio at 109 Broad Street, near the tip of Lower Manhattan, before his 1956 move to the nearby Coenties Slip studio with which he would be more famously associated. He worked nights at a post office to make ends meet and “fill[ed] sketchbooks with ideas of paintings to be realized as soon as his finances [would] allow.”³

We might also pivot along the axis of the 1956 Betty Parsons show. An installation shot documents the inaugural exhibition of both Black Curves and the multipanel painting Red Yellow White Black Blue (1955); Sketchbook #26 traces the evolution of both paintings.⁹ Four of its pages—22, 23, 24, 26—are devoted to variations of this latter work, testing permutations in the order and proportions of the titular colors; in fact, Kelly would continue to change the sequence of the actual painting’s panels even after it was executed and exhibited.¹⁰ Although, as Bois surmises, the vertical appearance of what was conceived as a horizontal painting in the Parsons show was likely due to space constraints, this variable orientation is nonetheless prefigured by the composition’s multiple incarnations in this sketchbook, where it appears now parallel, now perpendicular to the binding.¹¹ Subject to rotation at any time, a sketchbook introduces the possibility for artist and viewer alike to experience a shift in viewpoint that might be productive in its estrangement or instructive in its unexpectedness.

This same line of inquiry might be conducted almost indefinitely: each page of Sketchbook #26 contains the code for many more works of this period, from the heterogeneous components of Painting in Three Panels (1956), to the rectangular masses of Black White (1957–58), to the anthropomorphic Xs of South Ferry (1956), Times Square (1956; fig. 6), and Red White (1958), to the spliced halves of Black and White (1955–57) or Pole (1957).¹²

We might finish by pursuing the path onto which one last set of motifs from the first page opens out. At right, two rough ink drawings—one horizontal, one vertical—feature staffs of parallel lines, upon which Kelly has begun to place a series of marks. These seem to anticipate the variegated screens that he renders in more detail on pages 13, 18, and 19, which themselves anticipate monumental architectural projects like Sculpture for a Large Wall (1956–57) (currently on view in the Marron Atrium).¹³ The distance from intimate sketchbook to public sculpture may seem great, but the possibility of such a transposition was envisioned by Kelly all along. “My collages are only ideas for things much larger—things to cover walls,” he wrote to John Cage in 1950, and the same is true of his sketchbooks, which hold nearly infinite ideas for things much larger.¹⁴ Some of these ideas were realized, and identifying the sources of Kelly’s iconic forms within these pages produces a uniquely satisfying jolt of recognition. Many others of them weren’t, however, and perhaps that’s the reason such schematic renderings can ultimately be so moving: they point to all the directions left to take.