Ellsworth Kelly

1923–2015

Using a pared-down vocabulary and a deeply honed instinct for perceptual nuance, Ellsworth Kelly has continuously explored the tensions and balances he can cull from edge, shape, line, and color. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York and, after a stint in the Army, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Kelly developed his approach to abstraction while living in Paris from 1948 to 1954. His large-scale paintings and sculptures question the boundaries between the two categories. Using flat, unmodulated expanses of solid color, black, or white, Kelly explores the taut relationships that arise among space, architecture, and form within his distilled play of edges.

Kelly’s art is almost always a retranslation of what he has found by looking carefully at the world. “All my work comes from perceiving,” he has said. He painted the monumentally scaled Atlantic in New York and derived its curving, wavelike rhythm from a sketchbook in which he traced and filled in the shadows that moved across its pages while he was seated on a bus. The facing pages of the book and its central fold are mirrored in the painting’s diptych structure, although Kelly has rendered the shadows as white forms against a black ground. Perhaps the artist’s greatest mastery lies in his ability to recognize in the seemingly slight events the world presents him a potential for shifting and refining qualities of formal weights and balances into striking and powerful abstractions.

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 204.

Wikipedia entry

Introduction

Ellsworth Kelly (May 31, 1923 – December 27, 2015) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.

Wikidata identifier

Q544899

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Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 12, 2025.

Getty record

Introduction

American abstract painter worked with large forms of luminous color, often on shaped canvases.

Country of birth

United States

Roles

Artist, graphic artist, painter, sculptor

ULAN identifier

500004975

Names

Ellsworth Kelly

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Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 12, 2025.

Not on view

First acquired
1957

Date of birth
May 31, 1923

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