Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco
by Madeleine Grynsztejn
from University of California Press
This sweeping overview of Ellsworth Kelly's fifty-year career is the first to bring together the twenty-two pieces the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired from Kelly's personal collection in May 1999. The volume also includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and reliefs from the Museum's previous holdings and private collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary text by Madeleine Grynsztejn explores the evolution of Kelly's artwork, his longstanding interest in the phenomenology of vision, and his experimentation with compositions generated by the laws of chance. Additional essays by Julian Myers examine key issues and groupings of works, from Kelly's early figural paintings through the shaped panels and relief paintings for which the artist is best known. Produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco is an elegant presentation of the most significant collection of the artist's work. It secures Kelly's place as one of the most original of American artists.
Kelly's paintings and sculptures are recognized as vital to the evolution of postwar Modernism. One of the chief proponents of hard-edge abstraction during the 1950s, he is also celebrated for his large-scale monochrome canvases. In 1956, Kelly gained critical recognition when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased his work and the Betty Parsons gallery presented his first solo exhibition in the U.S. From the 1970s to the present, the scale of Kelly's work increased as he joined canvases of different sizes and shapes into asymmetrical formats and created totems in bronze, wood, and steel. From 1996 to 1998 the artist's work traveled to museums in Los Angeles, London, and Munich. Today Kelly's works are represented in museums and private collections worldwide, and he has received several prestigious awards and honorary degrees.
Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955
by Yve-Alain Bois
from Harvard university Art Museums
Yve-Alain Bois, the Harvard art historian, had an idea. He believed that through drawing, Ellsworth Kelly evolved "four different strategies for making art: chance, the transfer, the modular grid, and the monochrome panel, all of which served the overriding goal of developing an alternative to traditional composing that would be both radically inventive and stubbornly impersonal." So begins this thoughtfully conceived and beautifully produced catalog for an exhibition organized by the Harvard University Art Museums and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, that covers only an early, seven-year period in the life of this prolific abstract painter.
Bois's essay is filled with remarkable insights into Kelly's drawings and working methods during his sojourn in post-World War II France. Bois has an artist's mind: he refers to "the painter's attention to visual noise, to the 'insignificant' leftovers in the visual realm." And he explains what a rare, almost impossible luxury this "estrangement" from the world would have been for ordinary French citizens during reconstruction.
Brilliant and nourishing though Bois's essay is, however, it is appropriately upstaged by the impeccably reproduced drawings, collages, and paintings on paper, which leave the reader breathless. These studies are like fireworks: they explode in dozens of directions, putting the viewer in mind of artists as disparate as Barnett Newman, Howard Hodgkin, Henri Matisse, David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, and Brice Marden. The book opens with the typical young artist's drawing of his work table, then quickly shifts to the most extraordinary seaweed drawing, with a second one in gouache, giving pause to any reader who thought Kelly's much later leaf drawings fell from nowhere. There are, of course, the colored grids (Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance), the cut-up grids such as the sketch for Cite, a study for Yellow on Yellow, and nearly 200 other color plates, all reproduced with the kind of accuracy that allows you to imagine you've held them in your hands.
This is a book that even before it's opened looks as if it might be essential, especially for artists. Hundreds of pages later, that first impression is amply confirmed. --Peggy Moorman
Drawn from Nature: The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly
by Richard H. Axsom
from Yale University Press
Kelly has occupied the center stage of modernism since his early years in Paris in the 1950s. Distinguished for his abstract style of pure color and shape, Kelly believes that his art remains rooted in the natural world. In their simplicity of line and shape, his widely admired and accessible plant lithographs provide a critical link to the character of abstraction and are a remarkable achievement within the framework of Kelly’s lifetime of accomplishment.
American artist Ellsworth Kelly has occupied the center stage of modernism for some fifty years. His widely admired plant lithographs hold an important place in his remarkable oeuvre. This exquisitely illustrated book provides the definitive study of Kelly’s 72 plant, fruit, and flower lithographs, including insightful analyses of his art and approach to abstraction.
Ellsworth Kelly: Self Portrait Drawings 1944-1992
by Harry Cooper
from Matthew Marks Gallery
Think of an Ellsworth Kelly: an abstract consideration of the relationship between figure and ground; a conscious questioning of the conditions that underlie perception; an exploration of the relationship of painting and wall, sculpture and space, viewer and work. Now think of Ellsworth Kelly: a man, born in the 1920s in New York state, who has been recording his own appearance in ink and graphite over the years, capturing himself as his attitudes changed, his self-perception changed, his face and body aged. Collected here are five decades of Kelly's self-portraits, drawn between 1944 and 1992. The artist sketches himself in all variety of poses: bust, standing, sitting, clothed, nude, laughing, serious, self-possessed. The style of drawing changes as frequently, from line drawing to cubist to comic to naturalistic. Taken together, they present a marvelous portrait of the artist as a man.
Ellsworth Kelly: Spencertown
by Ellsworth Kelly
from Anthony d'Offay, London
Ellsworth Kelly: Artstudio
Artwork by Ellsworth Kelly. Contributions by Paul Taylor.
Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue--Paintings and Studies, 1958-1965
by Roberta Bernstein
from Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Red Green Blue is almost the title of a 1963 painting by Ellsworth Kelly. Red Blue Green, a monumental rectangular oil work, considered a crucial fulcrum point in the artist's career, represents Kelly's concerns about the tension between the figure and the ground, offering two precisely shaped and balanced red and blue forms set against a strongly contrasting green ground. Working within a strict set of limits, he created a string of similarly grand, powerful works and defined many of the ideas about line, form, and color that still drive his work today. These works, made from the late 50s to the mid-60s, established the artist's singular style and his reputation as one of the most innovative abstract painters of the latter half of the 20th century, one who boldly broke with the strictures of the abstract expressionist movement, which dominated painting in the United States in the 50s. Exploring the complex interplay of invented and real-world inspirations that led to this body of figure/ground paintings, this volume presents a selection of 21 major paintings and 36 related drawings, collages, and photographs from that time period, as well as a new painting from 2002 that reexamines related concerns.
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas (Dallas Museum of Art Publications)
from Dallas Museum of Art
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas offers a succinct survey of Kelly’s achievements in translating the visual world of the everyday into commanding paintings, sculpture, and works on paper—all of which demonstrate the artist’s groundbreaking use of form, line, color, and volume. Included are an introduction and essays on key works by Charles Wylie, Yve-Alain Bois, Robert Storr, and Wood Roberdeau. Together the images and text document one of the most consistently inventive and sustained careers of any American artist.
Ellsworth Kelly: 1954, Drawings on a Bus (Sketchbook S.) (Sketchbook S.)
by Ellsworth Kelly
from Steidl
This reproduction of Ellsworth Kelly's 1954 Sketchbook 23 offers a rare glimpse into the celebrated artist's rigorous exploration of line, form and composition. Drawn into a blank book and forming a single continuous gesture over 25 pages as the artist saw and captured the changing fall of shadows while riding on a bus in Paris, Kelly's line pursues a path of eccentric discovery and distillation through subtle variations and bold transformations.
