Kelly, Ellsworth

born May 31, 1923, Newburgh, N.Y., U.S.

U.S. painter and sculptor.

In 1948 the G.I. bill allowed him to travel to Paris, where he was exposed to various avant-garde developments. By 1949 he made his first completely abstract painting; he would create abstract work throughout his career. Kelly moved back to the U.S. in 1954. By the end of the decade he became a leading exponent of the hard-edge style of painting, in which abstract contours and large areas of flat colour are sharply and precisely defined. Influenced by the biomorphic abstractions of Jean Arp and the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse, he used the clean geometric lines of his paintings in painted, cut-out sheet-metal sculptures. Kelly refined his pursuit of pure style throughout the late 20th century, eventually also pursuing printmaking and large-scale public sculpture.

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▪ 2000

      Considered one of the foremost American artists of the post–World War II period, Ellsworth Kelly was the subject of two notable exhibitions in 1999. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City featured his work in its “Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture for a Large Wall and Other Recent Acquisitions.” The show's highlight, a 20-m (65-ft)-long, 3.4-m (11-ft)-high sculpture composed of 104 coloured aluminum panels suspended at various angles from four rows of metal rods, was Kelly's first commissioned sculpture. The work was created in 1957 for the Transportation Building at Philadelphia's Penn Center but was neglected after the building fell into disuse. Although the sculpture's restoration was no doubt gratifying for the artist, perhaps even more so was the publication of Line Form Color, a book of drawings that Kelly had begun in 1951. He completed the book in 1999 to coincide with an exhibition entitled “Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948–1955,” which was on view during the year at Harvard University's Art Museums, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ga., and the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition included, among many other works on paper, Kelly's 40 original ink drawings and collages for Line Form Color and provided a fascinating visual guide to the artist's early influences and aesthetic development. The show was scheduled to travel to Europe in 2000.

      Kelly was born on May 31, 1923, in Newburgh, N.Y. He demonstrated a talent for art during grade school and enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1941. After serving (1943–45) in the U.S. Army, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1948 he moved to Paris, where he began to lose interest in traditional representational art in favour of abstract imagery. He increasingly attempted to present an object or shape “as itself alone,” reducing it to its simplest geometric form, and he frequently experimented with the use of chance to determine colours and composition in his paintings. One of his favourite techniques was to cut a drawing into squares and then rearrange the pieces in a random pattern.

      Kelly returned to New York in 1954 and two years later had his first solo exhibition there. Critical recognition, awards, and commissions quickly followed, although widespread public acceptance took longer. He began working on a larger scale, creating his first freestanding sculptures in the late 1950s. He was perhaps best known for his monumental paintings, in which he pioneered the use of shaped canvases and multipanel compositions.

Amy R. Tao

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▪ American painter and sculptor

born May 31, 1923, Newburgh, N.Y., U.S.

      American painter and sculptor who was a leading exponent of the hard-edge style, in which abstract contours are sharply and precisely defined.

      Kelly studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School (1946–48) and at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1948–49) in Paris. He had his first one-man show in Paris in 1951 and returned to the United States in 1954. He rejected illusionism in his paintings, which typically consist of adjacent rectangular panels of flat, uninflected primary colours. Kelly used the clean geometric lines of his paintings (e.g., “Red Blue Green,” 1963) in his painted, cut-out metal sheet sculpture (e.g., “Gate,” 1959). He was commissioned to do sculptures for the Transportation Building in Philadelphia (1957) and the New York State Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (1964–65).

Additional Reading

E.C. Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly (1973), is the catalog from a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. John Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly (1972), contains excellent colour plates.

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