Reality Check
March 2008
In 1985 I journeyed to upstate New York to meet with Ellsworth Kelly and art historian Diane Upright to select works for her 1987 landmark exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper." A condition for visiting—guests had to be driven to and from the studio—struck me initially as odd, but after our meeting, I realized the reason was valid. It seems that studio visitors (indeed, often the artist himself) have experienced a sort of temporary "reality blindness" after a day spent looking at a range of Kelly’s work. (This would prove to include me.) One is unable to see shapes within their settings: The flat side of a dark-blue truck driving down the street becomes a navy-hued rectangle, for example, or a stop sign "reads" as a red octagon.Understanding this aspect of seeing Kelly’s art is important to appreciating his exceptional achievements. Indeed, Kelly has long been recognized as a master of modern art, and in a truly wide range of different media: paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints and photography. Seeking insight into his work, some writers have pointed to Kelly’s experience with camouflage when he served in the Army in World War II.
Interestingly, this association—about "seeing"—enjoys a historical connection. According to legend, one day on the eve of World War I, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque saw camouflaged tanks and trucks rolling down Paris streets. "We invented that!" said one to the other (I’ve heard both versions as to who the speaker was), in reference to the Cubist fracturing of forms. However, we might argue that Kelly’s art works opposite to how camouflage functions. Rather than merging a form into a setting, or into other forms, as camouflage does, Kelly’s perception instead pulls the form out. Shapes are isolated or abstracted from their context, thus the "unread" stop signs.
This distinctive way of seeing emerged early in Kelly’s career, beginning with his years living in France, from 1948 to 1954. One stunning composition from this period, "White Plaque: Bridge Arch and Reflection" (1953), both a large, painted-wood construction and a paper collage, is based on Kelly’s seeing an arched bridge over water. But here, in these joined elements, the artist gives us only the shadowed opening of the arch and its reflections on the surface of the water. The bridge itself and the other portions of the water’s surface have been excluded to underscore his focused vision of the scene.
Kelly returned to New York in 1954 and soon garnered important attention. Alexander Calder, whom Kelly had known in Paris, introduced the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney to his work. And more importantly, the still-unrecognized modernist David Herbert (then at the Sidney Janis Gallery) brought Kelly to Betty Parsons, which led to Kelly’s first one-man exhibition in New York in 1956. And now, some five decades later, Kelly’s art was recently celebrated and highlighted in New York—of note, with a record-setting sale and two public exhibitions, all featuring Kelly’s multi-paneled compositions. Interestingly, his multi-element pictures belong with a broader usage of many panel compositions found in post-1950 art, ranging from Mark Rothko’s trio of chapel triptychs and Willem de Kooning’s pair of altarpiece triptychs to Andy Warhol’s "Silver Double Elvis" diptychs and Jim Dine’s multi-panel "Tool Series" works.
Among Kelly’s most distinctive presentations are his panel works known as "Spectrums," including "Spectrum VI (in 13 parts)" (1969), which sold at Sotheby’s New York in November for $5,193,000, a record auction price for the artist. With colors ranging from yellow through the entire spectrum of hues to an enclosing, repeating color, again yellow, the "Spectrums" may vary quite widely among themselves, with regard to the proportions of the individual panels and on the spacings between the panels.
Some of Kelly’s panel compositions are among the artist’s most abstract, but at the same time they are based on things seen, through Kelly’s vision, in the everyday world. His great "Chatham" paintings of joined rectangular canvases of different dimensions and colors are derived from the sides and facades of barns that he saw in upstate New York and on Long Island—images he also photographed. So too, related compositions, including the angled rectangles of the commanding "White Black" (1988), were shown this winter at L&M Arts in New York. This dynamic union of shapes finds corresponding compositions in other Kelly photographs, especially his "Opening to a Cellar, Hudson, New York" (1977), an image I first saw on that 1985 studio visit.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.