Ellsworth Kelly

Marking the first museum exhibition devoted solely to the photographs of Ellsworth Kelly, this beautifully designed volume features each photograph in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s illuminating presentation of this lesser-known aspect of Kelly’s art. From the late 1940s on, Kelly created an era-defining body of abstract art based on many kinds of visual phenomena he perceived around him. Largely made for himself, Kelly’s photographs record these discoveries in tightly-composed images of nature and architecture that often reverberate with striking sunlight and shadow.
Similar as they may appear, Kelly did not base his paintings, sculpture and works on paper on his photographs. The camera for Kelly was yet one more artistic tool he used to brilliantly transcribe his lived surroundings into an art that, however abstract, always resonated with his subjective experiences of actual, everyday worlds.
Kelly’s rich sensory fascination with such worlds, from shadows on a beachside staircase to the curve of a snowy hillside, courses throughout this handsome book. To those familiar with or new to the artist, these photographs offer a vividly direct chance to see Ellsworth Kelly’s eye and mind at work unlike any other genre in which this groundbreaking artist ever worked.
Born in Newburgh, New York, Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) served in France in World War II’s Ghost Army, graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and returned to France from 1948–54. Over the next seven decades, back in New York City and then upstate, Kelly produced an uncompromising body of art that set new standards for the possibilities of abstract art in the 20th century. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives the world over and is represented in virtually every major national and international museum.

Accompanying the large-scale traveling exhibition Ellsworth Kelly at 100, this volume celebrates the groundbreaking career of the beloved American abstractionist. This publication highlights key aspects of his multifaceted art—from his lifelong drawing practice through his later explorations of layered canvas panels. Kelly frequently revisited shapes and motifs observed throughout his career, exploring form, color, line and space through painting, sculpture, collage, drawing and photography. The fully illustrated publication highlights works from major public and private collections alongside key works from Glenstone's collection, including seminal early pieces such as Painting for a White Wall (1952) and Painting in Three Panels (1956), as well as examples from the iconic Chatham and Spectrum series. Also featured is Yellow Curve (1990), a monumental floor painting installation that spans nearly 1,000 square feet, on view for the first time in more than 30 years since it was conceived for an exhibition at Portikus am Main in Frankfurt. Essays by Jean-Pierre Criqui, Alex Da Corte, Suzanne Hudson, Corey Keller and others explore and expand upon Kelly’s canon. With three gatefolds and a tip-on cover image, the book also includes unpublished archival materials from the artist’s studio and the Glenstone archives.
Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was born in Newburgh, New York. His first exhibition was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized his first retrospective in 1973. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Ellsworth Kelly’s landmark 1951 work Colors for a Large Wall is the culmination of an extraordinarily productive moment in the artist’s early career, a time when he developed his singular form of abstraction. After serving in the US Army during World War II, he returned to France in 1948 and lived and worked there until 1954. Connecting with artists of an earlier generation, discovering Paris with his peers, and surveying monuments of the past, Kelly began an audacious creative journey in which, paradoxically, he sought to eliminate "invention" from the process of making art. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Jodi Hauptman looks closely at the evolution of Colors for a Large Wall, unpacking Kelly’s toolbox of close observation of the world, chance procedures, collage and the monochrome, and examining his ambition to create art on a public, architectural scale.

Over the course of more than 50 years, renowned American artist Ellsworth Kelly made approximately 400 postcard collages, some of which served as exploratory musings and others as studies for larger works in other mediums. They range from his first monochrome in 1949 through his last postcard collages of crashing ocean waves, in 2005.
Together, these works show an unbounded space of creative freedom and provide an important insight into the way Kelly saw, experienced and translated the world in his art. Many postcards illustrate specific places where he lived or visited, introducing biography and illuminating details that make these pieces unique among his broader artistic production. Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards is the most extensive publication of Kelly’s lifelong practice of collaged postcards.
Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was born in Newburgh, New York. In 1948 he moved to France, where he came into contact with a wide range of classical and modern art. He returned to New York in 1954 and two years later had his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized his first retrospective in 1973. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London, Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Authored by Kelly scholar Yve-Alain Bois in direct collaboration with the late artist’s partner and estate, this comprehensive publication contains exhaustive documentation of the work of American artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), including his paintings, sculptures and reliefs.
Picking up where the first volume left off, this publication follows Kelly from his return to New York from France in 1954 through his early years living in the artist community of downtown Coenties Slip, where he shared a studio with friend and fellow abstract painter Agnes Martin. During this formative period spent in New York City, Kelly’s style evolved beyond the foundation of his French Cubist and modernist influences and into a distinctive abstract style which fused large-format painting with a study of shapes and planar masses. By 1958, Kelly’s practice had also expanded to include sculpture, a craft inspired by conversations with his studio-mate Agnes Martin, and which would go on to be a primary medium through which Kelly’s later work is understood. The evolution of Kelly’s style experienced during the years chronicled in this publication provided a much-needed bridge from the abstraction of the 1940s to the minimalism of the 1960s.
The publication includes insightful texts and high-quality images of individual works and preparatory drawings, along with provenance information, exhibition history and bibliographic information, making it an indispensable reference tool for institutions, collectors and admirers.

This monograph was copublished by Cahiers d’Art and Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: Windows, which brought together, for the first time, the six Windows made by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) in France between 1949 and 1950. Kelly’s years in France were a period of perpetual invention, and are fundamental to an understanding of his work. As he wrote in 1969, “After constructing Window with two canvases and a wood frame, I realized that ... painting as I had known it was finished for me.” This signal moment is evoked through more than 80 works, paintings, drawings, sketches and photographs, along with two beautiful essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Jean-Pierre Criqui.

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the most important abstract artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as a key figure in the rebirth of Cahiers d’Art: the publishing house was reopened in 2012 with an exhibition of Kelly’s work in its legendary gallery, and, in collaboration with Yve-Alain Bois and the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, it published the first volume of Kelly’s Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture, 1940–1953.

Though best known as a painter of scrupulous hard-edge abstractions, Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) saw drawing plants as playing a central role in his art. “The drawings from plant life seem to be the bridge to the way of seeing that brought about the paintings in 1949,” Kelly wrote in 1969. That way of seeing, he said, was “the basis for all my later work.” The rigorous and exacting observation of the natural world that Kelly used to make his plant drawings—a practice he continued through his whole career—helped him to refine his distinctly direct brand of minimal abstraction.

First published in 2017 and quickly going out of print, Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings features more than 30 drawings made by Kelly between 1949 and 2008. Kelly made these gorgeously economical line drawings from life, sometimes barely lifting the pencil as he translated each plant’s contours to paper. Focusing on direct visual impression—“nothing is changed or added,” as he put it—Kelly used the natural forms of the plants to explore some of his painterly fixations, like the effects of volume, negative space and overlapping planes. Despite the immediacy of their execution and their representational content, the most striking surprise of Kelly’s plant drawings is how much they share with his abstract paintings and sculptures.

In the late 1970s Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was commissioned by architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to create an artwork for the lobby of a new office building underway in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Kelly responded with one of his most ambitious artworks to date, Color Panels for a Large Wall, an 18-panel painting executed in two versions. The larger, at over 125 feet wide, was the biggest painting he had ever made, and its trajectory would pass through not just Cincinnati but also Amsterdam, New York and Munich before ending up at its permanent home, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where it has been prominently installed in the I.M. Pei–designed East Building since 2004.The smaller version, over 30 feet wide, remained in the artist's possession. This catalog tells the complete story of these two remarkable paintings.

These final paintings, made in the months leading up to his death in December 2015, further develop the non-compositional strategies he pioneered in the late 1940s and pursued throughout his life, including monochrome paintings, shaped canvases and joined panels.

The book also includes 16 photographs by Jack Shear of Kelly’s studio as he left it on his final day of painting—a poignant record of his seven-decade advancement of a singular artistic vision.

Written by Kelly scholar Yve-Alain Bois in direct collaboration with the artist, this comprehensive multivolume publication contains exhaustive documentation of each of Kelly’s paintings, sculptures, and reliefs.

The catalogue includes thorough and insightful texts, high-quality images of individual works and preparatory drawings, along with provenance information, exhibition history, and bibliographic information, making it sure to be an irreplaceable reference tool for institutions, collectors, and admirers.

This first volume is a stunning beginning to this extensive publication, with the subsequent volumes scheduled for release over the next several years. Encompassing Kelly’s work up to his return to the United States from France in 1954, the present volume covers the artist’s formative years as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and as a young artist living in Paris, where he began painting the abstract forms which would later define his career.

The Revue Cahiers d’Art was relaunched with this first issue in 2012 dedicated to Ellsworth Kelly. It contains an original lithograph by Kelly, and presents the work of several other artists: Sarah Morris, Cyprien Gaillard and Adrian Villar Rojas. It contains several texts, in particular those of the art historian Yve-Alain Bois, the architect Tadao Ando and Jean-Louis Cohen, historian of architecture and town planning.