Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Ellsworth Kelly has been a widely influential force in the post-war art world.
Background
Born in Newburgh, New York in 1923, Ellsworth Kelly was the second of three boys. He grew up in northern New Jersey, where he spent much of his time alone, often watching birds and insects. These observations of nature would later inform his unique way of creating and looking at art. His parents, an insurance company executive and a teacher, were practical and supported his art career only if he pursued this technical training.
Education
After graduating from high school, Ellsworth Kelly studied technical art and design at the Pratt Institute from 1941 to 1942.
In 1943, Kelly enlisted in the army and joined the camouflage unit called "the Ghost Army", which had among its members many artists and designers. The unit's task was to misdirect enemy soldiers with inflatable tanks. While in the army, Kelly served in France, England, and Germany, including a brief stay in Paris. His visual experiences with camouflage and shadows, as well as his short time in Paris strongly impacted Kelly's aesthetic and future career path.
After his army discharge in 1945, Kelly studied at the Boston Museum of the Fine Arts School for two years, where his work was largely figurative and classical. In 1948, with support from the G.I. Bill, he returned to Paris and began a six-year stay. Abstract Expressionism was taking shape in the U.S., but Kelly's physical distance allowed him to develop his style away from its dominating influence. Romanesque and Byzantine art appealed to him, as did the Surrealist method of automatic drawing and the concept of art dictated by chance.
While absorbing the work of these many movements and artists, Kelly has said he was deciding what he didn't want in a painting, and just kept throwing things out - like marks, lines and the painted edge. During a visit to the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, he paid more attention to the museum's windows than to the art on display. Directly inspired by this observation, he created his own version of these windows. After that point, he has said painting as he had known it was finished for him. Everywhere he looked, everything he saw, became something to be made, and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added. That view shaped what would become Kelly's overarching artistic perspective throughout his career, and his way of transforming what he saw in reality into the abstracted content, form, and colors of his art.
After being well received within the Paris art world, Kelly left for New York in 1954, at the height of Abstract Expressionism. While his work markedly differed from that of his New York colleagues, he said by the time he got to New York he felt like he was already through with gesture. He wanted something more subdued, less conscious.. He didn't want his personality in it. The space he was interested in was not the surface of the painting, but the space between you and the painting. Although his work was not a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, Kelly did find inspiration in the large scale of the Abstract Expressionist works and continued creating ever-larger paintings and sculptures.
In New York City, while creating canvases with precise blocks of solid color, he lived in a community with such artists as James Rosenquist, Jack Youngerman, and Agnes Martin. The Betty Parsons Gallery gave Kelly his first solo show in 1956. In 1959, he was part of the Museum of Modern Art's major Sixteen Americans exhibition, alongside Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg.
His rectangular panels gave way to unconventionally shaped canvases, painted in bold, monochromatic colors. At the same time, Kelly was making sculptures comprised of flat shapes and bright color. His sculptures were largely two-dimensional and shallow, more so than his paintings. Conversely, in the paintings he was experimenting with relief. During the 1960s, Kelly began printmaking as well. Throughout his career, frequent subjects for his lithographs and drawings have been simple, lined renditions of plants, leaves and flowers. In these works, as with his abstracted paintings, Kelly placed primary importance in form and shape.
In 1970, Kelly moved to upstate New York. Over the next two decades, he made use of his bigger studio space by creating even larger multi-panel works and outdoor steel, aluminum, and bronze sculptures. He also adopted more curved forms in both canvas shapes and areas of precisely painted color. In addition to creating totemic sculptures, Kelly began making publicly commissioned artwork, including a sculpture for the city of Barcelona in 1978 and an installation for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1993. In 2013 President Barack Obama presented Kelly with the National Medal of Arts.
Towards the end of the artist’s life he was in ill health, hampered by an oxygen tank, the need for which he is quoted as saying was because of "the turpentine", which prevented him from working on his "big paintings." However, Kelly continued to paint and innovate until his death on December 27, 2015.
Blue and Orange from Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs
Blue and White
Boats in Sanary Harbor
Blue on White
Study for Tiger
Circle Line
Blue and Yellow and Red-Orange
Horizontal Band
Mandorla Form
Grid Lines from the series Line Form Color
Blue and Red
Brooklyn Bridge VII
Untitled
Vertical Lines from the series Line Form Color
Winter (Black Curve)
Nine Colors
Spectrum III
Black over Blue
The Meschers
Black
Red Orange White Green Blue
Green
Diagonal Lines
Blue Green Yellow Orange Red
Colored Paper Image V (Blue Curves) from Colored Paper Images
18 Colors (Cincinnati)
Green Curves from the series Line Form Color
Red and White
The Mallarmé Suite
Red over Yellow from Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs
Derrière le Miroir
White Relief over White
Yellow from the series Line Form Color
Red/Blue (from Ten Works by Ten Painters)
Black Variation IV, from Second Curve series
Diagonal with Curve IX
Red Yellow Blue White
Study for White Plaque. Bridge Arch and Reflection
Green Curve
Study for White Sculpture
White Black
Red over Yellow
Black and White from the series Line Form Color
Creueta del Coll
Dominican
Red and Blue from the series Line Form Color
White
Nine Squares
Yellow Orange
Yellow over Dark Blue
Cite
Curve XXXVI
Diagonal
Blue and Red from the series Line Form Color
Untitled
Red, Yellow, Blue
Two Whites
Black, Brown, White
Blue Yellow Red
Saint Martin Landscape
High Yellow
Three Panels. Orange, Dark Gray, Green
Black Ripe
White on White
Colored Paper Images I, from the series Colored Paper Images
Spring (Yellow Curve)
Red-Orange Panel with Curve
Seine
Train Landscape
Red, Blue, Yellow
Red-Orange over Black
Three Panels: Orange, Dark Gray, Green
Horizontal Line
Triangle Form
Yellow and Blue
White Black
White Curve
Curve in Relief III (EK561)
White and Black
Colored Paper Image XVIII (Green Square with Grey)
White Curve VII
Tablet #65
Circle Form
Rectangle from the series Line Form Color
Green Form
Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VI
Black Forms
Black and Yellow from the series Line Form Color
Untitled
Running White
Grape Leaves II
Brown and White
Awnings, Avenue Matignon
Second Curve series: Gray Variation
Tablet #105
Untitled
Green Blue
Red and Yellow
Red Yellow Blue
Black from Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs
Red-Orange from the Suite of Twenty-Seven Color Lithographs
Blue Form on Yellow
Méditerannée
Tablet #205
Views
He joined a new wave of American painters coming of age in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, many wishing to turn away from the New York School's preoccupation with inner, ego-based psychological expression toward a new mode of working with broad fields of color, the empirical observation of nature, and the referencing of everyday life.
Quotations:
"I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract."
"The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it."
"Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt."
"In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best."
"My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them."
"The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future."
"A lot of young painters love to incorporate celebrity. One idea of being a painter is to use what's happening at the time. Velázquez was painting of his time. And so was Rembrandt. And Francis Bacon was painting his time in London. He was a real mover, but he saw the insect in the rose. But yes, when I do a painting, I want to take the "I did this" out of it. That's why I started using chance, like the markings on the wood. I never wanted to compose."
"I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me."
"I felt that everything is beautiful, but that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists."
Membership
Fellow Academy Arts and Sciences. Member National Academy Arts and Letters, National Academy of Design (academician, since 1994).
Interests
Artists
Pablo Picasso
Connections
From 1984 until his death, Kelly lived with his husband, photographer Jack Shear, who serves as the director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.