A Brief Survey of Ellsworth Kelly

When people that are new to Ellsworth Kelly or new to art in general view his works for the first time there is a tendency to believe that his work has no depth and is very simple. I was in that camp until I started reading about his life and learning what to look for in his art. I was struggling with how to open this essay on Ellsworth Kelly because I am by no means an expert on his life. I stumbled upon a quote of his that I think about sums up what he was trying to accomplish in his works. He said "I have worked to free shape from it's ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness." My goal, in this essay, is to give a brief chronology of his life, most of which I obtained from Ellsworth Kelly: The early Drawings; and then to examine a few of his works, hopefully relating some of the ideas behind them as well as what they mean to me.

Ellsworth Kelly was born on May 31^st, 1923 in Newburgh, New York. His family soon moved to Pittsburgh and then in 1929, about the start of the Great Depression, moved to New Jersey. They moved around quite a bit while he was growing up. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he attended classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and began his art training.

Then, in 1943, he was drafted into the army and World War II where he ended up serving in France, Germany, and England until the war ended in 1945. He was very lucky when he was drafted in that he was placed, upon his own request, in the 603^rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion. The 603^rd was responsible for creating camouflage netting and propaganda posters (which is how Ellsworth learned how to silk-screen) and kept his interest in artistic things alive throughout the war. During his wartime experiences he was unable to visit any of the museums all over western Europe because they were closed due to the war.

After the end of the war, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. He was able to pay for his time at the school by using money from the G.I. Bill which paid for his tuition, school expenses, and gave him a monthly allowance of seventy five dollars. He lived and taught art at the Norfolk House Center in Roxbury which also helped him save money. In 1948, he had his first exhibition. It was at a group show at the Boris Mirski Art Gallery in Boston. Later that same year he graduated from the Museum of Fine Arts and decided to move to Paris and attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

When he first arrived in Paris he stayed at the Hotel St-George. According to the Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings he hardly ever attended class at Ecole des Beaux-Arts and instead spent most of his time at museums around the Paris area (Yve-Alain Bois 254). In 1949 Ellsworth moved into a room in the hotel vacated by his friend Jack Youngerman at the Hotel de Bourgogne. At this hotel is where he first started taking an interest in biomorphic forms and abstractions in his work (Yve-Alain Bois 254). Throughout that year and into 1950 he traveled all over France visiting museums with his friends. He met Jean Arp and visited his studio. It was at this time that Ellsworth began working with chance collages and wood reliefs. (Yve-Alain Bois 255). Also that year he took a job working at the American School in Paris teaching children because his G.I. Bill income was about to expire.

In April of 1951 he put on his first solo show. He exhibited thirty pieces of work from 1949-51. None of his pieces were purchased but he did get some favorable mentions in the press (Yve-Alain Bois 255). After the director of the American School saw his work with the laws of chance and probability at the Arnaud Gallerie exhibition he fired him from teaching at the American School. Ellsworth had tried to explore the ideas involved in the laws of chance using ink spatters in his classes and was not following the traditional curriculum with the students. During his time teaching at the school he wrote to his friend Coburn saying that he was "interested in the accidental working--the subconscious working of just anyone-anyone" which included his students and ended up getting him fired (Yve-Alain Bois 24).

In October of 1951 he showed his pieces: Cite, Gironde, Talmont, and Meschers at a show called Tendance (which he also exhibited at the next year). Tendance was one of Gallerie Maeght's (Paris) annual exhibitions for young artists. His exhibition landed him a job working for Gustav Zumsteg (a textile manufacturer and art collector).

In 1954, Ellsworth moved back to the U.S. due to sickness and lack of steady income. He moved into lower Manhattan at the Coenties slip where he was neighbors with James Rosenquist and his friend Jack Youngerman. He spent a lot of time studying the relationships between form and ground and playing with the laws of chance in his work. Many of his most famous early works came out of this time period. He also took a night watchman position under the Marshall plan because he was out of money.

In 1956, two years after returning to New York, he began to show his work at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York and his career took off. He started selling more of his pieces at the shows and was also commissioned to do his first sculpture, the "Sculpture for a Large Wall" at the Transportation Building in Philidelphia in 1957 (Yve-Alain Bois 256). He had his work included in "Young America", in 1957, at the Whitney Art Museum and also had the first purchase of his work by a museum when the Whitney Museum purchased his piece "Atlantic". He showed in Paris at the Gallerie Maeght in '58 and then in '59 he had his first sculpture exhibit at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.

In 1963 he had his first solo museum exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Washington D.C. He also made one of his more popular pieces, "Two Curves", that was shown at the 1964 World's Fair which he later gave to Harvard University. In 1965 he started showing his work at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York and at the Ferus Gallery in L.A.

Later in 1966 he sold his first piece, "Blue Green, Red I" to a European museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and then in '69 he was commissioned to design a mural for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Paris, or UNESCO.

In 1970 Ellsworth was able to move uptown to Spencertown, one of his favorite places, where he still resides now in 2006. In 1971, the first monographs were collected regarding his work. There was the Ellsworth Kelly: Drawings, Collages, Prints by Diane Waldman and Ellsworth Kelly by John Coplans; both of which I used in my research for this essay.

Ellsworth was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in '74 and received the Painting Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago that same year. From 1975-79 he exhibited at the Blum Helman (New York), the Castelli (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Stedelijk Museum in Europe.

From 1979 on he was fully established as an artist, partly thanks to Castelli's endorsement of his work, and his pieces were in high demand. He had sculpture after sculpture commissioned and had his paintings set up in the National Gallery of Art as well as many other museums in the U.S. and Europe all throughout the 80's.

In the 1993 he was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in France which was very similar to being "Knighted" in England. He also received a commission to create a sculpture for the Boston Federal Courthouse, was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the first Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1995. Then, in 1997, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. In 1998, he received the Governor's Art award along with James Earl Jones in New York.

After September 11^th, 2001, Ellsworth created a collage to represent what he thought should be done with ground zero. It was a giant mound of grass represented by a green cut-out placed over a picture of ground zero on the front page of the New York Times. It was not received well.

In 2003, there were three separate shows at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, New York. One for self-portraits, one for paintings, and one for sculptures . The shows drew in thousands of people. This year, 2006, there is a big show of his work in St. Ives in Great Britain.

There are a few pieces of Ellsworth Kelly's art that really stand out to me. The first is his piece "Sanary" which he completed in 1952. It is my favorite work of his, and it was a part of his group of works which he called the "Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance." It was created while he was still in Paris. He was working on the idea of whether random chance and planned randomness could be distinguished from each other. In "Sanary" he used this idea of random chance to paint blocks of color onto a wooden grid. The grid consisted of seven columns and six rows. There were many colors chosen at random and placed on the grid with two stipulations against their randomness. The first is that black colors can only be in the second, fourth, and sixth columns; and the second was that no two of the same color could touch each other.

When I first viewed "Sanary" I did not pick up on the black in the columns and rows at all. It was not until reading about the collage in Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas that I even noticed the placement of the black squares. His skill is shown by the placement of order into a work that seems totally random until the explanation is known. The piece is just plain beautiful too. The color and the struggle between what is foreground and what is background keeps my attention and draws me into it. There are fourteen different colors in the collage, but I had a very hard time counting them. In the end I had to rely on the stats in the Dallas book because the colors seem to change hue as my eyes move around the grid, and I see them in relation to other colors. I can only imagine what it would look like at its full size of four by five feet. I might need to spend a full day studying it just to understand its full extent. If I was going to buy a print of his, then "Sanary" would be the one I would buy-If I could afford it!

Another piece of his that I think really stands out is his "Red Blue" from 1964. I especially like this piece because it looks like it wants to explode out of the frame. The bright primary red color is at complete odds with the primary blue background it resides on and looks so bold that it is almost angry at being confined. It really is just a simple, curved, flat colored, horizontal thumb-type shape that seems as though it doesn't have enough room around its edges to feel completely free. In some of his pieces he likes to play on the question of which shape is the foreground and which shape is the background, but in "Red Blue" there is definitely no question. The red is the foreground and is the protagonist of the piece, while the blue is the setting and the antagonist of the red. I may have read way too much into it, but that is what I see in this piece. I can't stop looking back at it even as I write this.

Some people have said to me as I write this essay that Ellsworth Kelly's art is "garbage" and is "a waste of space". My friend and former co-worker Steve pointed this out to me one day as I was preparing this paper in early October. I think what he meant was that it didn't fit his view of classical or Renaissance art and so had no value to him. One thing this class has taught me is to appreciate the simpler forms in life as art. I think that Ellsworth would agree that you only need the form or shape of an object to be able to appreciate its beauty. Sometimes the details only cloud the meaning behind the shape.

I found this drawing in Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas. "Solomon's Seal" is its name and it was drawn in 1967. This piece shows that just the line of an object can be enough to give it life. I think that in this drawing Ellsworth Kelly has created life. The plant looks so real that I want to reach out and touch it. I am amazed at how a few simple lines can recreate a real object effortlessly. I can imagine the feel of the leaves as I stare at the drawing and wish that I could do something as beautiful with so little. His visual acuity and ability to take a small squiggle and make it speak in three dimensions is amazing to me.

There were so many different pictures and sculptures that I wanted to discuss in this paper that it was very hard to pick just a few to show you. I feel that the ones I have chosen are good examples of what Ellsworth's art is all about. His works usually consist of a rhomboid shape with a curved line on one of the sides. This shape is an untitled work of Mr. Kelly's from 1983. This has become one of his favorite shapes over the last twenty or so years. It has appeared in so many of his works that you could almost call it his staple for any works in the mid-eighties until now. He used this shape in the piece that he did for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1993. He also used this shape in many of his outdoor sculptures. Usually the outdoor sculptures have two prongs that arc out from a point where the joined flat sides meet. They spread out in the shape above and return to earth at the end of two long curves in two sharp points as they touch down onto the earth. They demand their own space and are in stark contrast to any natural shapes they may be surrounded by. Much of his art is still new which is amazing considering he started creating it back in the forties!

I started this essay in a little bit of a panic. I was afraid that I wasn't going to find enough material to write an entire essay on a guy whose whole idea of art is a green triangle on a white wall. I am really glad that I was wrong. I think that in writing this essay Ellsworth Kelly's works have become some of my favorites. I had a lot of fun reading about his life and his wartime experiences. I think that it is especially interesting that he helped print propaganda for the war effort. I look forward to visiting museums sometime in the near future so I can see his work in person.

I started this essay with a quote so I think it's fitting that I end it with another quote that I found in Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco. It sums up his work more eloquently than I could ever hope to. It says of Ellsworth Kelly: "Over the course of a half-century he created paintings, sculptures, reliefs, collages, and drawings that give exuberant physical form to his unique way of seeing. His works are concrete manifestations of instants of the most vivid visual intensity. Spontaneous and with direct perception, each piece reflects a "flash" of something seen in the physical realm and transformed through a series of translations and distillations into an object that is singular in form-a color, a character" (Grynsztejn 9). Thanks for the opportunity to explore Ellsworth Kelly.

Works Cited Bois, Yve-Aain. Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Harvard University Art Museums. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1999.
Coplans, John. Ellsworth Kelly. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (undated).
Goossen, E.C. Ellsworth Kelly. The Museum of Modern Art. New Haven: Eastern Press, Inc. 1973.
Grynsztejn, Madeleine / Myers, Julian. Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002.
Kelly, Ellsworth. "Sanary". 1952. Book Image. Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas. October 24^th, 2006.
Kelly, Ellsworth. "Solomon's Seal". 1967. Book Image. Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas. October 24^th, 2006.
Kelly, Ellsworth. "Red Blue". 1964. Online Image. Ikon LTD. October 24^th, 2006.
http://www.ikonltd.com/past/details.cfm?PageNum_newaqimages=2&ExID=33&AutoArtID=539
Kelly, Ellsworth. "Untitled". 1983. Online Image. KASSMERIDIAN. October 24^th, 2006.
http://www.kassmeridian.com/kelly/kelly1.html
Waldman, Diane. Ellsworth Kelly: Drawings, Collages, Prints. A Paul Bianchini Book,
New York Graphic Society Ltd. Greenwich, Connecticut. 1971.