ELLSWORTH KELLY DIES AT 92; ARTIST WAS MASTER OF GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION
Suzanne Muchnic
December 27, 2015
Ellsworth Kelly in 1996 <
https://tinyurl.com/jrzd9c3>
As a young American in Paris in 1949 — four years out of the Army and one year out of a Boston art school — Ellsworth Kelly had an epiphany. The key to creative inspiration was in the world around him, not in other artists' studios or at the Louvre. If he paid close attention to, say, the contour of a window, the shape of a leaf, the play of light and shadows on man-made and natural forms, his art would emerge.
"I think if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract," the artist told an interviewer in 1991, reflecting on the evolution of his work. Six years later, when a Kelly retrospective exhibition — organized by New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he told a Times reporter: "I'm not searching for something. I just find it. The idea has to come to me … something that has the magic of life."
By then, Kelly was internationally known as a master of geometric abstraction, the high priest of crisp, hard-edge shapes and vivid colors. Art history books had classified him as an exemplar of Minimalism's cool aesthetic, which gathered force in the 1950s and '60s in reaction to Abstract Expressionism's emotional aura.
"Minimalism was a necessary, even valuable phase, of modern art," states "History of Art," a monumental text on Western art written by H.W. Janson and subsequently revised and expanded. "At its most extreme, it reduced art not to an eternal essence but to an arid simplicity. In the hands of a few artists of genius like Kelly, however, it yielded works of unprecedented formal perfection."
But for Kelly, perfection had little to do with geometry. What he wanted was joy. He found it through a keen perception of things he saw.
Kelly died Sunday afternoon at his home in Spencertown, N.Y. He was 92. His death was confirmed to The Times by Matthew Marks, owner of the Matthew Marks Gallery, which represents Kelly.
"I can confirm he died at home this afternoon. I saw him last week. He had just completed five new paintings. He was working well until the end," Marks said. "He had a nice Christmas with a lot of friends and fellow artists."
Four of Kelly's works fill a room at the Broad, the museum in downtown Los Angeles founded by philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe. In a review of the opening, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight noted the artwork's "seamless fusion of bold geometric shapes, crisp composition and saturated colors grabs you by the lapels.... All calmly share the same flat plane, perfectly balanced in scale and chromatic intensity, yet straining to burst their optical bonds. Kelly makes poise look easy."
Long before Kelly's death, art historians and critics pondered the complexities of his work and where it fit.
In the catalog of the Guggenheim's 1996-98 traveling retrospective, curator Diane Waldman wrote: "Kelly's need to make color an independent entity and to align it with a specific shape and space may have set him apart from a particular group or movement, but it has not set him apart from the art and culture of the 20th century nor from the age-old issues that animate art and give it its true meaning. It is Kelly's strength to objectify color and form and to distill its essence from the world of reality, drawing on human emotion, imagination, and spirit."
Reviewing the show for the New Yorker, Simon Schama wrote that the strength of Kelly's "opulently colored and gracefully formed" work was "its winning combination of perceptual subtlety and sensuous immediacy: a philosophical delicacy of vision pumped up into raw chromatic heft."
Kelly was born May 31, 1923, in Newburgh, N.Y. His father, Allan Howe Kelly, worked for the U.S. Army at West Point; his mother, Florence Githens Kelly, had been a teacher. The family moved to Pittsburgh when Ellsworth was a baby and in 1929 relocated to Oradell, N.J., where Allan Kelly became an insurance company executive.
Ellsworth, the second of three sons, honed his powers of observation early, developing what would become a lifelong interest in bird-watching. At Oradell Junior High School, he was honored as its "best artist" in the 1938 yearbook — and named the "class giant," apparently because of his height.
Kelly made his first oil painting in high school and studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1941 to 1943, when he was inducted into the Army. He briefly trained with mountain ski troops in Colorado but was granted a requested transfer to a camouflage battalion in Maryland, where he made silk screen posters used to teach concealment techniques. In 1944, he joined a decoy unit in Tennessee that was sent to Europe. Eventually stationed near Paris, he visited the city but was unable to go to the museums that he would come to know a few years later.
Discharged from military service in the fall of 1945, Kelly studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the G.I. Bill until spring 1948. Within a few months, he had returned to Paris with funds from the G.I. Bill. He registered at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but essentially educated himself by embracing the international art community, going to museums and traveling in France.
Kelly would become a pillar of 20th century American art. Marks, his dealer in the last decades of his life, called him "a true American original." But the artist's six-year sojourn in France launched his career. That's where he painted "Plant I," his first use of a white form on a black ground, and produced his first lithographs, collages, reliefs and shaped-wood cutouts. Turning away from figurative work, he joined two painted panels in "Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris." Often cited as a seminal piece, the 1949 construction transforms an architectural detail into a spare, geometric abstraction.
Kelly exhibited his work in Paris, but returned to the United States in 1954 and settled in New York. Although he had to support himself with a night job at a post office, he quickly made connections with artists and dealers. His first U.S. solo exhibition opened in 1956 at Betty Parsons' avant-garde gallery in Manhattan. Kelly continued to show at Parsons until 1963, then moved on to other prestigious New York galleries, including Sidney Janis, Leo Castelli and Blum-Helman.
In the late 1950s and '60s, he lived and worked at an artists' community on Coenties Slip, a tiny street overlooking the East River, where his neighbors included Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman. Kelly moved to Spencertown in upstate New York in 1970 and established a large studio there. He met his companion, photographer Jack Shear, in 1982.
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Tall, slim and energetic, Kelly radiated personal warmth and a sense of profound engagement with his work. In interviews, he might break into a dance or greet a reporter with a disarming question: "How long has it been since we talked?"
Kelly has left a huge legacy of parallel but interconnected bodies of work — paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints — made over long periods of time. Throughout his long career, he investigated natural forces and biomorphic forms as well as man-made curves and grids. His work has been exhibited at and collected by an international array of museums. He also has made a mark with major sculptural commissions in prominent places such as the Tokyo International Forum, Boston's federal courthouse and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Although he spent most of his life on the East Coast, Kelly had a strong connection to Los Angeles beginning in the mid-1960s. His work appeared in solo exhibitions at Ferus, Irving Blum, Margo Leavin and Ace galleries. He also made frequent West Coast trips to work with master printers at Gemini G.E.L. and art fabricator Peter Carlson, who built his sculptures.
But spring 2012 was an unusually big L.A. season for Kelly. Marks opened a Los Angeles branch of his New York gallery with a show of Kelly's new paintings in a boxy white building with a Kelly-designed black bar along the top of its façade. At the same time, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a sweeping survey of his printmaking activity, in conjunction with the publication of a complete catalog of his prints.
In a book about the prints, critic Dave Hickey wrote: "Kelly's idea, it would seem, is to impose order on the world without bringing the world to order. As a result, when the knowing skill of long practice begins to refine his way of working, begins to disguise the rowdiness of its roots, Ellsworth Kelly is happy to relinquish control, to make some mistakes, to let some things happen, and then look again — and then maybe adjust things a little here and there, as the eye suggests they should be. Then proceed."
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times
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PROMINENT ARTIST ELLSWORTH KELLY, WHOSE WORK CARRIED STRONG TIES TO DALLAS, DIES AT 92
Michael Granberry
Published: December 27, 2015
Ellsworth Kelly appears at the Dallas Museum of Art before the 2004 exhibition honoring his work. <
https://tinyurl.com/j549asq>
Renowned artist Ellsworth Kelly, whose work inspired an exhibition at the Dallas Museum and who even has a sculpture as part of the Dallas Cowboys Art Collection at AT&T Stadium, died Sunday. He was 92.
In its obituary, the New York Times credited Kelly with shaping “a distinctive style of American painting by combining the solid shapes and brilliant colors of European abstraction with forms drawn from everyday life.”
His death was announced by Matthew Marks of the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan.
From the Times obituary: “Born in Newburgh, N.Y., on May 31, 1923, Mr. Kelly studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after his discharge from the Army in 1945. But his formative years as an artist were in Paris, which he had visited briefly during World War II, and where he returned to live in 1948 with support from the G.I. Bill. When he arrived, he was painting figures influenced by Picasso and Byzantine mosaics. But he quickly immersed himself in museums, adding both Asian art and Matisse to his eclectic store of influences.”
Kelly was the focal point of a 2004 exhibition at the DMA titled “Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas.” The show included paintings, drawings and sculpture drawn from the DMA’s “extensive collection” of Kelly’s work, from private collections and from Kelly’s studio. “Kelly’s art,” reads the show’s description, “reflects his way of looking at the world through essential shapes found in nature.”
Charles Wylie, then the DMA’s curator of contemporary art, said: “Ellsworth Kelly brings a fresh eye to abstractions of the natural world. For example, a leaf becomes a lozenge-shaped horizontal form, a shape that frequently appears in his red, green, and blue paintings, which were the subject of an important recent exhibition of Kelly’s works. Several paintings from that period, which ranges from the early 1950s to the present, are found in Dallas collections and will be in the exhibition. ‘Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas’ not only represents the depth of the artist’s works in Dallas but also ties together institutions in the Dallas Arts District, including preliminary drawings for the colorful panels commissioned for the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Hall and drawings and a sculpture from the Nasher Sculpture Center.”
Art critic Rick Brettell wrote this piece about Kelly in September and covered his Dallas connections extensively:
“At 92, Ellsworth Kelly is the dean of American artists. He has made abstract color paintings, utterly simple drawings of plant forms, playful sculptures and suites of prints since the late ’40s – and continues to produce important work with the gusto of youth in his studio in upstate New York. He is the honoree this month at Two x Two for AIDS and Art, following other important artists, all of whom are much younger. By dint of his seven-decade career, he is the most prestigious of the group.
“When the Dallas Museum of Art opened in 1984, one of the most important commissions that inaugurated its new downtown building was a major Kelly sculpture in landscape architect Dan Kiley’s wonderful sculpture garden. It has the usual laconic title familiar to students of modern art, Untitled. The DMA also has a major painting, 1980′s Red Panel, and a group of prints by Kelly. There are also major works by Kelly in Dallas private collections, including nine works in the Marguerite and Robert Hoffman collection promised to the DMA.
“Kelly was the only painter commissioned to work with I.M. Pei on a huge-scale work for the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, 1988′s Blue Green Black Red: The Dallas Panels, and the Nasher Sculpture Center has an important bronze sculpture from 1986. Fort Worth doesn’t lag far behind, with a major early painting from 1963, Curved Red on Blue, and a 1986 triptych: Dark Blue Panel, Dark Green Panel, Red Panel, both at the Modern Art Museum. The DMA mounted an important 2004 exhibition called ‘Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas,’ which featured loans from Nobel laureate Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein; Robert Brownlee; Gayle and Paul Stoffel; Gail and Dan Cook; Kathy and Richard S. Fuld. Jr. and a group of collectors who preferred anonymity. If all goes according to plan and Kelly makes the trip from New York to Dallas later this month, we will, thanks to Two x Two and the professional and personal friendships that Kelly has with many Dallasites (including the DMA’s Hoffman family senior curator of contemporary art, Gavin Delahunty), have the spry artist himself.”
Here is a YouTube interview with Kelly <
https://tinyurl.com/jygu93n>
©2015, The Dallas Morning News Inc
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ARTIST ELLSWORTH KELLY, MASTER OF COLORFUL ABSTRACTION, DIES AT 92
Neda Ulaby
December 27, 2015
Ellsworth Kelly <
https://tinyurl.com/ptfg3dx> , one of the greatest American artists of the past century, has died at 92.
Kelly died at his home in Spencertown, N.Y., says gallery owner Matthew Marks, who has represented the artist for two decades. Kelly is survived by his longtime partner Jack Shear.
For seven decades, Kelly created pure, strong shapes and colors, immersive and brilliant. His vivid geometric blocks, in sculpture and paintings, are displayed at modern art museums from Paris to Houston to Boston to Berlin.
He started his artistic career in France — but not by wearing a beret and standing behind an easel. He was in a U.S. Army uniform during World War II, serving in a special unit made mostly of artists. Their job was to fool the Germans into thinking there were more Allied forces than there actually were.
Kelly told NPR in 2007 they did it partly by building fake tanks and trucks from wood and burlap.
"But later they were made in rubber — inflatable and they looked like the real thing," he said.
A visitor looks at the artwork Two Panels — Blue-Yellow (1970) by Ellsworth Kelly as part of the exhibition "J'aime les panoramas" (I love the panoramas) at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Marseille, southern France, on Nov. 2. <
https://tinyurl.com/olq5wl4>
After the war, Kelly lived in Paris. Art historian Sarah Rich says he'd walk around snapping photographs.
"And not photographs of famous places, like the Eiffel Tower, but photos of an alleyway" — or a plain old window, or the side of an unassuming building.
In that photograph, Kelly would see a square. And he would use that black square as the basis of a painting.
Of course, you don't need a photo to paint a black square. You just need a ruler. But Ellsworth Kelly wanted to bring scraps of the world almost mystically onto his canvas.
In this 2007 Ellsworth Kelly piece, four separate oil-painted canvases combine to form a single work, Green Blue Black Red. <
https://tinyurl.com/z6bolto>
He boiled shadows and shapes down into abstractions — monochromes, just one strong, pure, bright color. Kelly said that came from his boyhood in New Jersey surrounded by nature.
"I've always been a colorist," he said. "I think I started when I was very young, being a birdwatcher fascinated by the bird colors."
The way Kelly used colors made them feel almost alive. Just to face a giant red rectangle by Ellsworth Kelly is to come to red in a fresh and profound way.
"I feel that I like color in its strongest sense," Kelly told NPR in 2013. "I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define. I liked red, yellow, blue, black and white — [that] was what I started with."
When Kelly moved to New York in the 1950s, abstract expressionism was all the rage. He did not fit in, says Sarah Rich, with all the cooler-than-cool artists flinging paint at canvases — or dripping it, or standing in it.
"He was really not interested in their corny expressionism and epic self-importance," she says. "All of that stuff just seemed burdensome and dull."
Forging a new aesthetic language in that environment was not easy, Kelly said.
"It was a very hard job doing it all by myself, getting to where I am," he told NPR.
A visitor looks at an installation by artist Ellsworth Kelly on June 18, 2010, as part of an exhibition at Villa Medici, the headquarters of the French Academy in Rome.<
https://tinyurl.com/zxwmo7u>
Where Ellsworth Kelly was, when he died, was the position of a universally recognized master of contemporary art. He influenced minimalism and pop art with his bold, spare paintings, drawings and sculptures, which are in virtually every major museum of modern art.
When Kelly was 90, NPR asked what he enjoyed most about being very old.
"I feel like I'm 20 in my head," he said. "My painting makes me feel good and I just feel like I can live on.
"If you just keep working, maybe that's possible."
© 2015 npr
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ELLSWORTH KELLY OBITUARY
One of the most important American abstract artists who created brilliant modular canvases and spectacular outdoor sculptures in steel
Christopher Masters
Monday 28 December 2015
Ellsworth Kelly at his 2006 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. <
https://tinyurl.com/qdejb2g>
The American abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly, who has died aged 92, created sharply defined compositions that were, at least initially, linked to his visual experiences – “a window, or a fragment of a piece of architecture, or someone’s legs ...” In the early 1950s, his style anticipated the unbroken colours and clear lines of hard edge painting by some years. Although he was associated with a number of movements, including minimalism in the 1960s, Kelly remained resolutely independent, combining his austere sense of form with a unique, sunstruck palette.
Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York, though he spent much of his childhood in New Jersey. His father, Allan, who initially worked for the army, eventually settled down into insurance, while his mother, Florence, a former teacher, exerted a stronger influence. As well as encouraging her son’s lifelong interest in ornithology, she gave him an inspiring art book when he was in his teens, though she later disapproved of his career choice. He reached adulthood during the second world war, and, after a technical education at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, served in a camouflage battalion in Maryland and Tennessee before joining the allied forces in France – an extraordinary first taste of the country and its culture.
Works byEllsworth Kelly on display at the Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Ellsworth Kelly exhibition preview at Villa Medici in Rome in 2010. <
https://tinyurl.com/qgvs8ow>
At the end of the war, Kelly began his artistic education, which was paid for by the state under the GI bill. Even more important than his classical training from 1946 until 1948 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were the six years he spent immediately afterwards in Paris, where he met European luminaries such as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi and Joan Miró, as well as the fellow Americans John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Alexander Calder.
During this period, Kelly rapidly moved from the naturalism of his striking Self-Portrait With Thorn of 1947 through a series of hieratic, expressionistic figures to almost entirely abstract, often monochrome paintings. Many of his works are modelled on architectural fragments: Mandorla, of 1949, derives from the upper facade of the 12th-century cathedral in Poitiers, while the shadows of railings on steps determined the pattern of the La Combe series of 1950-51.
Kelly described how, when visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1949, he was influenced more by the windows than by the images that hung between them. The resulting drawing led to a highly abstracted picture consisting of two canvases, one reversed and the other painted white, inside a black frame. It is an early example of Kelly’s multipanelled compositions, which were partly inspired by Renaissance polyptychs, especially Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. But they were intended above all to emphasise their own material rather than representational or expressive qualities. As Kelly put it, they are simply “objects, unsigned, anonymous”.
Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2004. <
https://tinyurl.com/gn7zbbf>
Many of Kelly’s works from this time reflect the innovations of older, heroic figures in the French art world. The post-cubist Antibes is named after the town with the Picasso museum, which Kelly visited in 1949; the black-and-white stripes of Cité (1951) were arranged in an arbitrary way, partly based on a dream and reflecting surrealist procedures. This emphasis on the accidental also inspired the painting Spectrum Colors Arranged By Chance (1951-53) and the “exquisite corpse” drawings made in 1950 with Ralph Coburn, an expatriate friend from Boston. By the end of his stay in France, Kelly had created some classic compositions of coloured rectangles with repeated modular forms, as in Red Yellow Blue White and Black with White Border (1952-53). But success and prosperity eluded him. He took a variety of jobs, from art teacher and night-watchman to textile designer, before suffering an attack of jaundice in 1954. He decided it was time to go home.
On his return to the US, Kelly moved into the Coenties Slip area of lower Manhattan, close to artists such as Agnes Martin and Robert Indiana, in a culture that was quite different from the abstract expressionists’ aggressively male, heterosexual milieu. Kelly’s work ranged from ink drawings based on the changing shadows inside a moving bus to remarkable abstract paintings – black or coloured forms floating effortlessly against a white margin, or, from the mid-60s, panels joined together to create complex, three-dimensional shapes. Luminous effects were created with a range of hues, often subtly different from primary colours and applied in several layers, while pigments from one area of a painting were mixed with those in another so that the different zones would relate to each other.
Ellsworth Kelly in his Broad Street studio, New York, in 1956. <
https://tinyurl.com/hlbhq45>
His fame was developed by his relationships with the Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries, and he was frequently associated with fashionable contemporaries such as the hard edge painters, who included his friend Jack Youngerman. Kelly was also linked to minimal art, though his approach was quite distinct from that of Frank Stella, who bluntly declared “what you see is what you see”.
In contrast, Kelly’s brilliant canvases created rich pictorial effects, especially when seen against the white walls of a modernist interior, while some works played sophisticated perceptual games akin to those of op art. In Red Green (1968), for example, the suggestion of depth is complicated by an area of the painting projects towards the viewer in a recessive green hue.
Other pieces made specific references to external objects or events. Yellow With Red Triangle (1973, now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC) drew on Kelly’s longstanding interest in architecture, in this case the relationship between a dormer window and a roof he could see from his studio. Such images also express Kelly’s belief in the elusiveness of visual reality, the constantly changing configurations perceptible in everyday life. “I want to capture some of that mystery in my work,” he said.
For all his chromatic intensity, Kelly was not averse to using duller tones for specific expressive or visual effects. His grey panel paintings in the mid-70s conveyed his own reactions to the war in Vietnam; Diagonal With Curve XIV (1982) is a dark sheet of weathering steel, inspired by one of his ornithological enthusiasms, the flight of the black skimmer, as depicted by the 19th-century illustrator John James Audubon.
During the 70s and 80s, Kelly produced many spectacular sculptures from steel and other metals, often for outdoor settings. Although he had first made wall reliefs from coloured aluminium panels in the 50s, his most ambitious early projects, notably the Statue of Liberty surrounded by gigantic abstract forms, could hardly be realised except in collage. However, after Kelly moved to Spencertown, in upstate New York, in 1970, he was able to set up a number of large pieces with characteristic curved edges in his own garden, as well as outside the Connecticut home of the architect Philip Johnson.
Later commissions, including works for Barcelona including the totem-like structure in Plaza del General Moragues (1987), were even more monumental in scale and significance.
Kelly’s interest in articulating sensitive public spaces also led him to create powerful compositions for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (1993), and, in 1998, for the Deutscher Bundestag in Berlin and the US courthouse in Boston. His versatility was displayed not only in his use of materials ranging from fibreglass to aluminium, but also by the way in which he responded to different physical and emotional contexts.
The undisputed importance of Kelly to postwar abstract art led to a series of prestigious exhibitions, from the retrospective organised by Diane Waldman at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1996, to an intimate show six years later at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, which juxtaposed Kelly’s refined, even austere plant drawings with more fluid examples by Henri Matisse.
Acquisitions of Kelly’s work were made in 1999 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where many of the artworks mentioned here are located, and four years later by the Menil Collection in Houston. Other galleries commissioned site-specific objects, including White Curve, Kelly’s largest wall sculpture, for Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago (2005).
From the point of view of architectural integration, a particularly impressive achievement was Blue Black (2001), an 8 metre high aluminium panel in Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St Louis. In its tones and proportions it is a fine complement to Ando’s architecture, exemplifying Kelly’s desire to create pictorial effects that involve the whole of the setting. Such works typify his achievement, enhancing the viewer’s experience of his or her surroundings, while expanding the role of abstract art beyond its familiar expressive and formal functions.
Kelly was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 1993 and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 2002. In 2013 he was awarded the US National Medal of Arts.
He is survived by his husband, Jack Shear, and a brother, David.
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
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ELLSWORTH KELLY, GIANT OF ABSTRACT PAINTING, DIES AT 92
By Andrew Russeth
12/28/15
Ellsworth Kelly <
https://tinyurl.com/ns2tasd> , who began his influential 70-year career with thrilling advances in abstract painting that he would go on to explore and hone, with rigor and wit, for decades, died yesterday at the age of 92. Matthew Marks, the dealer who represented the artist in New York, confirmed his death, which was first reported in the New York Times.
Kelly’s accomplishments are enormous. He was among a handful of artists, emerging in the years after World War II, who defined the art of the past half-century, and with his death, that thrilling chapter of art history is, sadly, beginning to come to a close.
With expressive abstraction on the rise in the late 1940s in Europe and the United States, Kelly took a radically different path, creating works that are boldly spare, with decisive lines and solid colors—never a move wasted. Though carefully planned, they feel loose, natural, and elegantly at ease.
He looked around for ideas of what to paint and draw. “The found forms in a cathedral vault or in a plane of asphalt on a roadway seemed more valuable and instructive, an experience more sensual than geometrical painting,” he’s said. “Rather than making a picture that would be the interpretation of something I saw or the representation of an invented contents, I found an object and I presented it ‘as is.’ ”
Window, Museum of Art, Paris, 1949. <
https://tinyurl.com/zh72qfg>
A few key early works reveal the extent of his invention during those years: Window, Museum of Art, Paris (1949), which is a deadpan, life-sized painting on wood of precisely that—nothing but thick, straight black lines, and rectangles, gray and white; Seine (1951), which depicts a flowing river with just small black squares on a white canvas that he ordered using a system underpinned by chance; and Colors for a Large Wall (1951), made of 96 individual squares, also distributed by aleatoric means.
Kelly has been seen as a successor to the hard-edged abstraction of various early-20th-century avant-garde movements, as a precursor to the Minimalists of the 1960s, or even as a dissident compatriot of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, but as with so much great art, his complete body of work brushes aside categorization. “My work is about structure,” he wrote in 1969. “It has never been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. I saw the Abstract Expressionists for the first time in 1954. My line of influence has been the ‘structure’ of things I liked: French Romanesque architecture, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Oriental art, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Klee, Picasso, Beckmann.”
Colors for a Large Wall, 1951. <
https://tinyurl.com/pp4czqn>
“Things I liked.” That phrase feels essential. Kelly’s art is deeply humanist, and throughly immersed in the world. It is about soaking in visual pleasure—from buildings and bodies and plants and animals. His soothing curves, darting lines, and expanses of color welcome the eye and invite allusions. Asked to explain what he is communicating in his works, he once said, “It’s about perception, to feel it somehow.”
Kelly was born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York, along the Hudson River, about 90 minutes north of the city by train. He grew up in Oradell, about 10 miles from Manhattan, at the time a fairly rural area of New Jersey. He liked bird watching as a child. “My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors,” Kelly told Gwyneth Paltrow in 2011. “I said, “Jesus, a little blackbird with red wings.’ That was one of the first birds I saw in the pine tree behind my house, and I followed it as he flew into one of the trees—like he was leading me on. In a way, that little bird seems to be responsible for all of my paintings.”
Colors for a Large Wall, 1951. <
https://tinyurl.com/zq69g5l>
Following high school, Kelly went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for three semesters and then signed up for the war in Europe, joining the Army’s 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion. After the war, he enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston but found the training too traditional, and so it was off to Paris, with which he had fallen in love, to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. “I didn’t go to Paris to go to school,” he told Rachel Cooke in the Observer, of London, earlier this year. “I just wanted to look around, and see a few paintings. The Beaux-Arts was the only place that didn’t care about attendance. I painted the nude that got me in, and then the tutor never saw me again.” Instead he soaked in the culture, visited with artists—like Brancusi and Calder, who once helped pay his rent—and experimented, heading deeper into abstraction.
Color Panels for a Large Wall, 1978. <
https://tinyurl.com/zkp7uyx>
A walk along the Seine in Paris inspired the same–named canvas, whose shimmering surface prefigures the Op art that artists like Bridget Riley would propagate a few years later. “Every night, walking home, I would walk down the outside quay and see the lights from the bridges on the water,” he told Jason Farago in the Guardian earlier this year. “I would just stand there and look at those reflections, and I thought: I want to do something that looks like this. But I don’t want to do a Pointillist painting. I said, I want to do something that flickers.” He randomly distributed the squares across a grid by pulling numbers from a box, adding one for each column as he neared center of the work.
While living outside of Paris during one summer around that time, Kelly saw a film of Jacques Cousteau swimming underwater. “The whole audience went, ‘Woo, ahh,’ and I said, ‘Why don’t they do that to my paintings?’ ” he said, laughing, in a recent video interview with Andrew M. Goldstein for Artspace magazine. “I want them to faint.” Pretty soon he would regularly be offering up completely abstract paintings and works on paper—seemingly straightforward shapes radiating pure hits of color, like Orange Red Relief, made of two rectangular panels, one of each color (from 1959, it is in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum) or Spectrum V, with thirteen panels in a color array (from 1969 and owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).
Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957–58. <
https://tinyurl.com/ovx4m3h>
Kelly moved to New York in the mid 1950s, falling in with a group in downtown Manhattan that included Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.
As his acclaim steadily grew, he began to produce large-scale, site-specific pieces, as in the glorious 64-foot-long, 104-panel Sculpture for a Large Wall that he made for the new Transportation Building in Philadelphia (dated 1956–57, it is now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York); Color Panels for a Large Wall, 18 panels of vivid color he designed for the Central Trust Company of Cincinnati, Ohio (1978, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.); a big untitled work for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, New York; and the five gargantuan vertical Dartmouth Panels (2012) that now grace the outside of the Hood Museum at that university in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Memorial, 1993–95. <
https://tinyurl.com/q7uk3d2>
Kelly’s work proves that abstraction, even in its most reductive forms, can address specific issues with nuance and grace. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., holds a four-panel white work, titled Memorial (1993–95). In Ground Zero (2003) he proposed covering that site with grass by crafting a tender collage—a green quadrilateral atop a New York Times aerial photo of the ruins.
Many of Kelly’s best paintings confidently but quietly exude a kind, gentle humor. They can recall the curves of elbows, knees, buttocks, flower petals. “I want my paintings in some way voluptuous, to a certain point—and certainly bodies are very voluptuous,” he’s said. Occasionally zest dashes of wit pulse through, like the two winking orange eyebrows that adorn Gold with Orange Reliefs (2013), which appeared in Kelly’s penultimate show at Marks, “At Ninety,” in 2013.
The artist’s list of major solo exhibitions is long. MoMA, the Met, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the NGA, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Guggenheim, and Detroit Institute of Arts are among the institutions that have hosted shows—full-on retrospectives, as well as focused surveys of his works on paper, his prints, the metal sculptures he began making later in his career, and the tender, intimate drawings of plants that he has made throughout his career. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will reopen following renovations this spring with a Kelly show.
Rendering of the interior of Austin (2015), Kelly's chapel in Austin. <
https://tinyurl.com/ozaudx6>
His work is held in numerous public collections. The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, is currently at work on a non-denominational chapel that Kelly designed, which is expected to open in the next year or so. He is survived, according to the Times, by his husband, Jack Shear, who directs the nonprofit Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, and a brother, David.
In the 2011 interview with Paltrow, Kelly said that he was an atheist, but that if he believed in anything it would be “Nature. What this is.”
“You’re a pantheist then,” she said.
“Yes,” he continued. “I want to paint in a way that trees grow, leaves come out—how things happen.”
“I feel this earth is enough,” Kelly said later. “It’s so fantastic. Look up at the sun. It’s millions of years old and still to be millions more. And there are all the spaces we can never see.” He told a story about how he became an atheist and continued, “Who wants heaven? I want another 10 or 15 years of being here. When you get to age 90, you have to accept it. This has been my life. It is what it was. I put everything into it that I could.”
Copyright 2015, ARTnews Ltd,
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ELLSWORTH KELLY, THE AMERICAN ABSTRACT PAINTER AND SCULPTOR, DIES AT 92
The artist, who was influenced by Picasso and Matisse, bridged European and American modernism, said gallery owner Matthew Marks
Reuters
Sunday 27 December 2015
The American abstract painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly has died at the age of 92.
Matthew Marks of the Matthew Marks Gallery said Kelly died of natural causes at his home in Spencertown, three hours north of New York. Marks said he was told of the death by Kelly’s partner, Jack Shear.
Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923 and served in the US military during the second world war. Afterward, he studied art in France for several years on the GI Bill and had his first solo show at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris in 1951.
He returned to New York several years later.
“I think he bridged European and American modernism,” Marks said. “He was a real American original.”
Tributes to Kelly posted on social media on Sunday included those from the historian Simon Schama and the New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, who described Kelly as a “cosmic geographer”.
Sorry to hear of Ellsworth Kelly's passing; another giant gone. Intense radiance through deceptive simplicity; wizard of the cunning line
— Simon Schama (@simon_schama) December 28, 2015
Ellsworth Kelly. R.I.P. 1923-2015. Cosmic geographer. 🔥🔥🔥 <
https://tinyurl.com/goxbwd5>
— Jerry Saltz (@jerrysaltz) December 28, 2015
Kelly had retrospectives at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others over his decades-long career.
“In his work Kelly abstracts the forms in his paintings from observations of the real world, such as shadows cast by trees or the spaces between architectural elements,” according to his biography on the Guggenheim’s website.
He also carried out public commissions around the world, including a memorial for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Kelly, who named Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse among his influences, told the opening of a large contemporary art wing showcasing his work at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2013: “I am nourished by the past, I am questioning the present, and I am stepping into the future.”
RIP artist #EllsworthKelly:
https://t.co/bqhyEcNmAA Installation view from his 1996 retrospective at the Guggenheim: <
https://tinyurl.com/gwrn68l>
— Guggenheim Museum (@Guggenheim) December 28, 2015
We lost another great one today, our friend Ellsworth Kelly.
— Hammer Museum (@hammer_museum) December 28, 2015
Kelly said that Picasso had inspired the subsequent generation of artists.
“I thought he showed young artists how to make a picture,” he told the Guardian in June 2015. “I liked him from the beginning – but I felt that I had to get him off my back. I only saw him once. He was in a car, backed up in traffic, and I looked into the window and there he was with his black eyes.
“Picasso said, ‘Do I know you?’ And his chauffeur came back; he was inviting me to come in and sit. I thought, my French was so bad if I get in he’ll kick me out in three minutes.” The car then sped off, Kelly said.
Ellsworth Kelly – a life in pictures <
https://tinyurl.com/zmpubn4>
He had lived and worked in Spencertown for the past 45 years, although was restricted in recent years by a respiratory condition which required him to be hooked up to an oxygen bottle.
In November 2015, he told the Guardian’s sister newspaper the Observer: “I want to live another 15 years. But I know I’m not going to. I’m not really whole any more. I think it [the state of his lungs] is to do with the turpentine, because I wasn’t a smoker, but I need the oxygen now.
“I give what I’ve got. It’s harder. I can’t work on really big pictures any more, so the ideas are blocked a bit. But then, the visions were always too much.
“I feel like the world is over there, and it keeps coming at me, and I want to do it, respond to it.”
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ELLSWORTH KELLY, AN ARTIST WHO MIXED ABSTRACT WITH SIMPLICITY, DIES AT 92
By Holland Cotter
Dec. 27, 2015
Ellsworth Kelly, one of America’s great 20th-century abstract artists, who in the years after World War II shaped a distinctive style of American painting by combining the solid shapes and brilliant colors of European abstraction with forms distilled from everyday life, died on Sunday at his home in Spencertown, N.Y. He was 92.
His death was announced by Matthew Marks of the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan.
Mr. Kelly was a true original, forging his art equally from the observational exactitude he gained as a youthful bird-watching enthusiast; from skills he developed as a designer of camouflage patterns while in the Army; and from exercises in automatic drawing he picked up from European surrealism. Although his knowledge of, and love for, art history was profound, he was little affected by the contemporary art of his time and country. He was living in France during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in New York and only distantly aware of art in the United States. When he returned to America in 1954, he settled on what was then an out-of-the-way section of Manhattan for art, the Financial District, and had little interaction with many of his contemporaries. The result was a deeply personal and exploratory art, one that subscribed to no ready orthodoxies, and that opened up wide the possibilities of abstraction for his own generation and those to come.
Born in Newburgh, N.Y., on May 31, 1923, Mr. Kelly studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after his discharge from the Army in 1945. But his formative years as an artist were in Paris, which he had visited briefly during World War II, and where he returned to live in 1948 with support from the G.I. Bill.
The seven years he subsequently spent there had continuing emotional resonance for him throughout his life. In a 1996 interview with The New York Times, he recalled his early days in the city:
“Paris was gray after the war. I liked being alone. I liked being a stranger. I didn’t speak French very well, and I liked the silence.”
The Influence of Paris
When he arrived, he was painting figures influenced by Picasso and Byzantine mosaics. But he quickly immersed himself in museums, adding both Asian art and Matisse to his eclectic store of influences.
He also spent time outside Paris visiting Romanesque churches, and the relationship between art and architecture remained important to him, evident in the many public commissions he completed late in his career.
As isolated as he may have felt in Paris, he met extraordinary people. Some of them, like John Cage and Merce Cunningham, were Americans passing through. Others were resident legends.
He visited the studio of the abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whose simplification of natural shapes remained one of Mr. Kelly’s formal ideals. He was introduced to the Surrealist Jean Arp, whose use of chance as a compositional device Mr. Kelly adopted. The sculptor Alexander Calder became a friend, as did the young American painter Jack Youngerman.
Within a year of his arrival, Mr. Kelly was painting his first abstract pictures using a mix of chance elements and references to nature, which he defined as everything seen in the real world.
“I started to look at the city around me, and that became my source,” he said.
The early paintings and drawings were derived from patterns found in sidewalk grates, or configurations of pipes on the side of a building. A gridlike field of black and white squares was inspired by the play of light on the Seine. A painted wood cutout, “Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris” (1949), corresponded in dimensions and form to the title object.
“I realized I didn’t want to compose pictures,” he told The Times in 1996. ”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.”
Mr. Kelly’s use of found elements went beyond just letting his eyes wander. It led him to create purely abstract paintings composed of randomly arranged and joined colored panels, a radical move even for him.
“I wondered, ‘Can I make a painting with just five panels of color in a row?’ I loved it, but I didn’t think the world would. They’d think, ‘It’s not enough.’ ”
It did take time for the art world to catch up with him. Although he had a one-person show in Paris in 1951, there was scant response and he was turned down for several group exhibitions. A piece he submitted for one exhibition, a relief painting, was rejected on the ground that it wasn’t art. Meanwhile, his G.I. Bill support was coming to an end, forcing him to seek jobs as an art teacher, a textile designer and a custodian.
Although he had been away from America when the great tidal pull of Abstract Expressionism was in full force, he was aware of it enough to know that it wasn’t temperamentally for him. “I didn’t want an art that was so subjective,” he said. “I wanted to get away from the cult of the personality.”
Finding Favor Back Home
The anonymous role of the Romanesque church artist remained a model. But in 1954, after reading a favorable review in ARTnews of an Ad Reinhardt show in New York City, he began to think that his own fairly spare abstract work might find favor there, and he returned to the United States.
Short on cash when he arrived, he ended up living in a half-deserted section of Lower Manhattan near South Street Seaport, in a 19th-century sailmaker’s loft on Coenties Slip.
His neighbors there eventually included the artists Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney and Mr. Youngerman, as well Mr. Youngerman’s wife, the actress Delphine Seyrig. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had arrived in the area earlier; Barnett Newman had a studio on nearby Wall Street.
Their lofts were spartan. Few had kitchens or hot water, and there were constant threats of eviction. The rewards were abundant space and light, as well as removal from the Abstract Expressionist scene farther uptown.
For Mr. Kelly, the open skies of the harbor and the streets paved with stone blocks that had been whaling ships’ ballast softened the culture shock of shifting from Old World to New. And just as he used the shapes of Parisian architecture in his earlier paintings, the grand arches of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge appeared in his New York City work.
Despite his remote location, the art world found him. The dealer Betty Parsons, who also represented Reinhardt, visited Mr. Kelly’s studio and offered him a solo exhibition in 1956.
That same year he received his first sculptural commission, the mural-size “Sculpture for a Large Wall,” for the lobby of the Transportation Building in Philadelphia. In 1957 the Whitney Museum of American Art bought a painting, “Atlantic,” which depicted two white wave-like arcs against solid black. It was Mr. Kelly’s first museum purchase.
In 1959 Dorothy C. Miller, the influential Museum of Modern Art curator, included Mr. Kelly’s work in “Sixteen Americans,” an important survey of emerging artists that included Johns, Rauschenberg and Youngerman, as well as Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson and Jay De Feo.
By the early 1960s, Mr. Kelly’s career was firmly if quietly established, although it would be decades before he gained the high profile enjoyed by some of his contemporaries. This was partly because his work was basically contemplative in spirit, and partly because — during a period defined by movements like Pop, Op and Minimalism — he fit no ready category.
In addition, he worked in several media, experimentally combining at least two. Along with paintings, drawings and collages, he produced free-standing and relief sculptures. In addition to making cut-out wood and steel panels that functioned as monochromatic paintings, he composed works from two or more overlapping canvases, effectively creating a hybrid of painting and sculpture.
In doing so, he made some of the first shaped canvases of the postwar period. And stressing the object quality of his works led him almost seamlessly to free-standing sculpture. The simplicity, flat color, bold scale, and especially his cultivation of a geometry full of flexible organic undertones formed a crucial example for the Minimalists.
In 1965, after nearly a decade with Parsons, he began to show with the Sidney Janis Gallery. A year later he had work selected for the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale; in 1968 he was in Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany. He would subsequently be included in three more Venice Bienniales and in the 1977 and 1992 editions of Documenta, the international exhibition held every five years in Germany.
In 1970, after living for several years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he moved permanently to the upstate town of Spencertown, where he eventually built a large studio and designed a parklike garden to display his outdoor sculptures.
In 1973 he had his first American retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; his second, in 1996 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, traveled to Los Angeles, London and Munich. His first major European retrospective was at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1979.
Other surveys focused on specific bodies of work. These included a sculpture retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982; a retrospective of works on paper at the Fort Worth Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1987; and a print retrospective at the Detroit Institute of Arts, also in 1987.
In 1992 “Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France” was organized by the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris and the National Gallery in Washington.
In recognition of his close early relationship to France, Mr. Kelly was given three awards by the French government: Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 1993 and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 2002.
‘Forever in the Present’
Mr. Kelly’s importance in American postwar art was increasingly acknowledged from the late 1970s onward, in part thanks to strong gallery representation. In the 1970s and 1980s, his work was handled jointly by Leo Castelli and Blum Helman. In 1992, he joined the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan and the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London. Along with gallery and museum shows, those decades also brought numerous public and institutional commissions.
A characteristic permanent installation might consist of a series of large single-color painted canvases or steel panels in varying shapes — wedges, arcs, triangles, trapezoids — cartwheeling across an expanse of wall.
One of his most moving installations, though, was one of his quietest. Made for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, it consisted of a plain white fan-shaped form floating opposite a triptych of three rectangular white panels. Suggesting the image of a great bird lifting upward over closed windows, the piece distilled the rigorously refined visual vocabulary Mr. Kelly had developed over a long career.
In 2013, Mr. Kelly received the National Medal of Arts, considered the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, from President Obama.
He is survived by his husband, Jack Shear, and a brother, David.
Mr. Kelly was as adamant about what his art was not as about what it was. Unlike the work of the early European modernists he admired, it was not about social theory. It was not about geometry or abstraction as ends in themselves. And although he derived many of his shapes from the natural world, his art was not about nature.
“My paintings don’t represent objects,” he said in 1996. “They are objects themselves and fragmented perceptions of things.”
Although he was interested in history and concerned about his place in it, he spoke of his own work as existing “forever in the present.”
“I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living,” he said. “This is an illusion, of course. 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.”
