A third group of pictures I would single out as another of Kelly’s highest achievements, are his triptychs, made up of three individual shaped canvases in different colors, which are positioned on the wall according to the artist’s installation directions. This past January one of Kelly’s major triptychs, "Three Panels: Orange, Dark Grey, Green" (1986), became a centerpiece of a special hanging of his art at the Museum of Modern Art, gathered from the museum’s important collection of Kelly works.

In a way akin to the earlier "arch and reflections" composition, these works revise the conventional church altarpiece triptych, in which rectangular panels (or panels topped with Gothic arches) have a center panel with a Holy Family or saints, flanked by symmetrical panels with a balanced number of saints. Other triptychs might have a composition that extends from the lower portion of the left panel (for example, the Magi looking down on the Christ child) through the center of the center panel (a crucifixion) to the upper-right panel (Christ’s ascending to Heaven, disciples looking upward). In this context, Kelly’s shapes are present, but the conventional rectangular panels of the triptych are not included; the forms and colors of the panels are in visual conversation with each other, as with the depicted interconnections among the figures in traditional altarpiece panels. In the end, Kelly’s "simple" works require the effort of seeing as Kelly does.

A further dimension of Kelly’s master status may be found in his drawings of plants and in his lesser-known portrait drawings. Here we might say his isolating vision is replaced with "full" sight, as Kelly attends to the entire image before him. Plants are "more direct," he told me during that 1985 visit, because a leaf is "already flat," while his portraits—only of friends and colleagues—often cause him some (unwarranted) anxiety over his ability to capture the sitter, despite Kelly’s Holbein-like combination of grace and realism.

Of course, we might say that Kelly’s own larger self-portrait is composed of a unique body of works in various media. To approach them with an understanding of his particular vision is a way of seeing Ellsworth Kelly and of recognizing his high accomplishments.

Art historian E.A. Carmean Jr. is preparing a study of religious projects of eight major modern artists, including Ellsworth Kelly’s design for a country chapel.