Ellsworth Kelly

Atlantic
1956

Ellsworth Kelly’s massively scaled geometric abstractions are often grounded in something actually seen. Atlantic derives its abstracted curves from shadows cast across the pages of a book that Ellsworth Kelly was reading while riding a bus. The facing pages of the book and its central fold are mirrored in the painting’s diptych structure, while the shadows themselves are reversed in his black-and-white scheme (so that the shadow actually appears as white, on a black ground). Kelly first translated the shadow, curved by the bowing of the book, into a group of drawings in 1954, then into a smaller painting, Study for Atlantic (1956), and finally into the grand scale of Atlantic—more than 9 feet wide. Atlantic is also the largest of Kelly’s black-and-white canvases of the late 1950s, made just before he reintroduced a wide spectrum of colors into his work.

Not on view

Date
1956

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on canvas, two parts

Dimensions
Overall: 80 1/8 × 114 5/16in. (203.5 × 290.4 cm)

Accession number
57.9a-b

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase

Rights and reproductions
© Ellsworth Kelly

API
artworks/2423