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Kelly Ellsworth

Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955

Harvard university Art Museums

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During his expatriate years in France (1948-54), Ellsworth Kelly developed the visual strategies that would make him one of the most important artists of our era. This is most evident in his French drawings, here presented thoroughly for the first time, together with a searching commentary by noted scholar Yve-Alain Bois. In drawing, Kelly evolved four strategies for making art: transfer, chance, modular grid, and monochrome panel. His goal was to develop an alternative to traditional composition at once radically inventive and stubbornly personal. This bi-lingual German/English catalog presents an intimate view of the process of artistic conception.
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

Ellsworth Kelly: Thumbing through the Folder

Walther Konig, Koln/D.A.P.

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In this Dialogue on Art and Architecture, Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923) reminisces with Hans Ulrich Obrist about his early career, his teachers (Max Beckmann, Brancusi, Leger and Vantongerloo) and particularly on the relation of his work to architecture: "architects are usually the first people who understand my work," he tells Obrist here, while describing his many collaborations in this field. Throughout this beautiful publication runs a series of collaged and overpainted postcards by Kelly, dating from 1949 to 1984, which are reproduced here for the first time. These postcards, referred to throughout the dialogue, are unlike any of Kelly's paintings and sculptures, particularly in their use of body imagery; others are closer to familiar Kelly terrain, as projections of torn colored paper forms onto found landscapes and architecture. This artist's book makes a wonderfully unusual record of a warm encounter.
Ellsworth Kelly: Wood Sculpture

MFA Publications

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Ellsworth Kelly describes the 30 wood sculptures he created over the span of four decades between 1958 and 1996 as his "totems." This body of work, although only a small proportion of the artist's lifetime sculpture and far less known than his work in metal, has a talismanic intimacy for Kelly that distinguishes it from the rest of his hard-edged oeuvre. Ellsworth Kelly: Wood Sculpture presents a retrospective of these wood sculptures for the first time, offering an investigation into the development of this intensely personal expression of Kelly's commitment to abstract art--and to nature. Many of these wood sculptures, now in private collections, are rarely seen and hardly known by the public. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2011, this book speaks to the artist's lifetime of acute visual observation and how deeply "of nature" his work has always been.
Drawn from Nature: The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly

Yale University Press

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An American artist of worldwide renown, Ellsworth Kelly has consistently returned to nature as a subject throughout his extraordinary career. Kelly began making prints in 1964; shortly thereafter he created his first suite of plant lithographs. To date he has produced 72 plant lithographs that fall into five major series: Suite of Plant Lithographs (1964–66); Leaves (1973–74); Twelve Leaves (1978); Series of Plant and Flower Lithographs (1983–85); Oak Leaves (1992); and several individual works. This comprehensive book serves as a beautiful portfolio of the plant lithographs accompanied by informative texts on all of these works as well as an insightful discussion of how they relate to the ink and pencil plant drawings that the artist has produced concurrently with the lithographs throughout his career.
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.
Ellsworth Kelly: Self Portrait Drawings 1944-1992

Matthew Marks Gallery

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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: 1954, Drawings on a Bus (Sketchbook S.)

Steidl

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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.

Kelly Ellsworth News




Baseball: Kelly's walkoff drops Ellsworth - Republican Eagle
Republican Eagle, MN - May 20, 2009
Baseball: Kelly's walkoff drops EllsworthThe Wingers made two errors that inning, which allowed Ellsworth to score six runs. Senior Dan Bergeson's RBI triple helped Red Wing answer with five runs in the third. Kelly finished with three RBI. Regnier was 2-for-4 with a double, a run and three

Ellsworth Kelly creates from all angles - San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle,  USA - May 08, 2009
Ellsworth Kelly creates from all anglesNo visitor to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's new Rooftop Sculpture Garden will overlook Ellsworth Kelly's "Stele I" (1973), a work in weathering steel that stands nearly 20 feet tall. A symmetrical vertical lozenge, viewed frontally,

J. Appenzeller third, Austin fifth at state - Boone News Republican
Boone News Republican, IA - May 26, 2009
J. Appenzeller third, Austin fifth at stateIn a field event, in the discus, Boone's Dani Ellsworth took ninth place with a toss of 108-0. Two Boone shuttle hurdle relay teams were second in their heats in the preliminaries. The girls unit of Madi Prouty, Alexa Pomerenk, Jess Kelly and Carli

MADISON Art school picks residents, sets lecture schedule - Central Maine Morning Sentinel
Central Maine Morning Sentinel, ME - May 25, 2009
MADISON Art school picks residents, sets lecture scheduleThis will be the 63rd class of artists to attend the annual summer program, which includes among its alumni Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly and Lee Bontecou, as well as emerging artists Laylah Ali, Hank Willis Thomas and Dana Schutz.

A Modern Wing preview: The Pritzker Garden and Ellsworth Kelly's ... - The Skyline
The Skyline, IL - May 12, 2009
A Modern Wing preview: The Pritzker Garden and Ellsworth Kelly's On the other side is artist Ellsworth Kelly's just-installed "White Curve," a beguilingly reflective, fan-shaped sculpture that hangs from new precast concrete walls. Made of painted aluminum, it's Kelly's largest wall sculpture.