Ellsworth kelly
Ellsworth Kelly (Newburgh, New York, May 31, 1923-Manhattan, New York, December 27, 2015) was an American abstract sculptor and painter famous for his chromatic experimentation.
Childhood
Kelly, the second child of three children born to Allan Howe Kelly and Florence Rose Elizabeth (Githens) Kelly, was born in Newburgh, New York, approximately 60 miles north of New York City. His father was an insurance company executive of Scotch-Irish and German descent. His mother was a former German school teacher. His family moved from Newburgh to Oradell, New Jersey, a city of about 7,500 people. His family lived near Oradell Reservoir, where his paternal grandmother introduced him to ornithology when he was eight or nine years old.
There he developed his passion for shape and color. John James Audubon had a particularly strong influence on Kelly's work throughout her career. Author Eugene Goossen speculated that the two- and three-color paintings (such as Three Panels: Red Yellow Blue, I 1963) for which Kelly is so well known can be traced to his birdwatching and his study of the two and three colored birds that he saw so often at a young age. Kelly has said that he was often alone as a child and became something of a "loner." He had a slight stutter that persisted into his teens.
Training
Kelly attended a public school, where art classes emphasized materials and sought to develop the "artistic imagination." This curriculum was typical of the broader trend in education that had grown out of the progressive education theories promulgated by the Columbia University Teachers College, in which the American modernist painter Arthur Wesley Dow had taught. Although his parents were reluctant to support Kelly's art training, a school teacher encouraged him to go further. Since his parents only paid for technical training, Kelly first studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which he attended since 1941 until he was drafted into the Army on New Year's Day 1943.
Military Service
Entering the United States military service in 1943, Kelly applied to be assigned to the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, which recruited many artists. He was admitted to Fort Dix, New Jersey and sent to Camp Hale, Colorado, where he trained with ski mountaineering troops. He had never skied before. Six to eight weeks later, he was transferred to Fort Meade, Maryland. During World War II, he served alongside other artists and designers in a deception unit known as The Ghost Army. The ghost soldiers used inflatable tanks, trucks, and other subterfuges to mislead the Axis forces about the direction and disposition of the Allied forces. His exposure to military camouflage during his time served became part of his basic art training.Kelly served in the unit from 1943 until the end of the European phase of the war.
Post-war training
Kelly used the G.I. Bill to study from 1946 to 1947 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he took advantage of the museum's collections, and then at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While in Boston he exhibited in his first group show in the Boris Mirski Gallery and taught art classes at the Norfolk House Center in Roxbury.
While in Paris, Kelly established his aesthetic. He attended classes infrequently, but immersed himself in the rich artistic resources of the French capital. He had heard a lecture by Max Beckmann on the French artist Paul Cézanne in 1948 and moved to Paris that year. There he met fellow Americans John Cage and Merce Cunningham, experimenting in music and dance, respectively; the French surrealist artist Jean Arp; and the abstract sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, whose simplification of natural forms had a lasting effect on him.
He also coincided with Carmen Herrera, Haywood Bill Rivers, Zao Wou-Ki, Wols, Van Velde, Poliakoff, Maria Helena Viera da Silva and the Spaniards Palazuelo, Canogar and Sempere. The experience of visiting artists such as Alberto Magnelli, Francis Picabia, Alberto Giacometti and Georges Vantongerloo in their studies was transformative.
Career
After being abroad for six years, Kelly's French was still poor and she had only sold one painting. In 1953 he was expelled from his studio and returned to America the following year, after reading a review of an exhibition by Ad Reinhardt, an artist whose work he felt was related to his work, he had become interested in him. Upon his return to New York, he found the art world "very difficult." Although Kelly is now considered a key innovator and contributor to the American art movement, it was difficult for many to find the connection between Kelly's art and mainstream stylistic trends.
In May 1956, Kelly had her first New York exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery. Her art was considered more European than what was popular in New York at the time. He exhibited again at his gallery in the fall of 1957. Three of his pieces: Atlantic, Bar, and Painting in Three Panels, were selected and shown in the exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, & #34;Young America 1957". Her pieces were considered radically different from the other twenty-nine artists' works. The three-panel painting, for example, was particularly prominent; at the time, critics questioned him by creating a work from three canvases. For example, Michael Plante has said that, in most cases, Kelly's multi-panel pieces were cramped due to installation restrictions, which reduced the interaction between the pieces and the architecture of the room.
Eventually, Kelly moved out of Coenties Slip, where she sometimes shared a studio with her artist friend Agnes Martin, on the ninth floor of the large studio/co-op Hotel des Artistes at 27 West 67th Street.
Kelly left New York City for Spencertown in 1970 and was joined there in 1984 by his partner, photographer Jack Shear. From 2001 until his death, Kelly worked in a 20,000-square-foot studio in Spencertown reconfigured and expanded by architect Richard Gluckman. Kelly and Shear moved into the residence they shared until the painter's death in 2005, a paneled colonial house built around 1815. Shear is the director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.
In 2014, Kelly organized an exhibition of Matisse drawings at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In 2015 he curated the exhibition "Monet / Kelly" at the Clark Art Institute.
Kelly died in Spencertown, New York on December 27, 2015, aged 92.
Painting
While in Paris, Kelly continued to paint the figure, but in May 1949 he made his first abstract paintings. Observing the dispersion of light on the surface of the water, he painted Seine (1950), made of randomly arranged black and white rectangles. In 1951 she began a series of eight collages entitled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII. She created them using numbered sheets of paper; each referring to a color, one of eighteen different shades that she will place on a 40-inch by 40-inch grid. In each of the eight collages she used a different process.
Many of his paintings from the 1950s consist simply of a single, sharply defined abstract patch of bright color on a neutral background. Kelly's 1952 discovery of Monet's late work instilled in him a new freedom of pictorial expression: he began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome painting. As a painter he worked from then on in a exclusively abstract mode. In the late 1950s, his painting emphasized form and flat masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work from this period also provided a useful bridge from the avant-garde of American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and '70s. Kelly's relief painting, Blue Tablet (1962), for example, was included in the seminal 1963 exhibition, Towards a New Abstraction, at the Jewish Museum.
During the 1960s he began working with irregularly angled canvases and produced some of the first irregular-format works, in which the canvas is stretched over a three-dimensional frame to create the desired shape. Yellow Piece (1966), the artist's first shaped canvas, represents Kelly's fundamental break with the rectangular support and his redefinition of the figure/ground relationship of painting. With its curved corners and a single, all-encompassing color, the canvas itself becomes the composition, transforming the wall behind it into the background of the image.
In the 1970s, he added curved shapes to his repertoire. Green White (1968) marks the debut of the triangle in Kelly's work, a shape that recurs throughout his career; the painting is composed of two distinctly shaped monochrome canvases, which are installed one above the other: a large-scale inverted green trapezoid is placed vertically on top of a smaller white triangle, forming a new geometric composition.
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After leaving New York City for Spencertown in 1970, he rented an old theater in nearby Chatham, allowing him to work in a more spacious studio than he had previously occupied. After working there for a year, Kelly embarked on a series of 14 paintings that would become the Chatham Series. Each work takes the shape of an inverted L, and is made of two joined canvases, each canvas a monochrome of a different color. The works vary in proportion and palette from one to the next, and she paid careful attention to the size of each panel and the color selected to achieve balance and contrast between the two.
A larger series of twelve works that Kelly began in 1972 and not completed until 1983, Gray was originally conceived as an anti-war statement and is devoid of color. In 1979 he used curves in two-color paintings made from separate panels.
In later paintings, Kelly distilled her palette and introduced new forms. In each of her works, she began with a rectangular canvas that she carefully painted with many layers of white paint; and a shaped canvas, mostly painted black, is placed on top.
Referring to his own work, Kelly said in a 1996 interview: "I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposition to the chaos of everyday life. This is an illusion, of course, but you keep trying to freeze the world like you can make it last forever. In a sense, what I have tried to capture is the reality of flow, to keep art in an open and incomplete situation, to reach the ecstasy of seeing."
Kelly commented, "I realized I didn't want to compose pictures... I wanted to find them. I felt like my vision was to pick things out in the world and present them. For me, perception research was of great interest. There was. there was a lot to see, and it all seemed fantastic to me".
The best-known works of his last period are his painted panels, which consist of the union of several canvases that have on occasion reached 64; each canvas is painted in a different, intense colour, creating a vibrant, carefully balanced whole.
Lithographs and drawings
Kelly presented drawings of plants and flowers beginning in the late 1940s. Ailanthus (1948) is the first drawing of a plant he executed in Boston, Hyacinth (1949) was his first when he was in Paris. Beginning in 1949, while living in Paris (and influenced in this choice of subject by Henri Matisse and Jean Arp), he began to draw simple shapes of plants and algae. marine. The studies of plants are, for the most part, outline drawings of leaves, stems, and flowers made with clean pen or pencil strokes and centered on the page.
He took up the production of prints in the mid-1960s, when he produced his Suite of twenty-seven lithographs (1964–66) with Maeght Éditeur in Paris. It was then that he created his first set of plant lithographs. Beginning in 1970, he collaborated primarily with Gemini G.E.L.. His initial series of 28 transfer lithographs, entitled Suite of Plant Lithographs, marked the beginning of a corpus that would grow to 72 prints and innumerable foliage drawings.
In 1971, he completed four editions of prints and an edition of the multiple Concorde reflected in Gemini G.E.L. His Purple / Red / Gray / Orange (1988), at eighteen feet long, may be the largest single-sheet lithograph ever produced. His recent editions, The River, States of the River, and River II, reflect the fascination with water. which Kelly had owned since her early days in Paris. In 1975, Kelly was the first artist to exhibit for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art's MATRIX series. The exhibit featured Kelly's series of drawings, Corn Stalk, and two of his 1974 steel sculptures.
Sculpture
Although Kelly is known for his paintings, he also worked in sculpture throughout his career. In 1958, Kelly conceived one of his first wooden sculptures, Concorde Relief I (1958), a wall relief in elm on a modest scale, exploring the visual interplay and balance between two forms. overlapping rectangles. He made 30 wood sculptures throughout his career. Beginning in 1959, he created free-standing folded sculptures. The Rocker series began in 1959 after Kelly's chance conversation with Agnes Martin, who lived below him in Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. Playing with the paper lid of a take-out coffee cup, Kelly cut and bent a section of the round object, which he then set on the table and rocked from side to side. Soon after, he built his first Pony sculpture. The title refers to a child's toy horse with curved rockers.
In 1973, Kelly began making regular large-scale outdoor sculptures. Kelly abandoned painted surfaces, instead choosing unvarnished steel, aluminum, or bronze, often in totem-like configurations like Curve XXIII (1981). While her freestanding sculpture totemic forms can measure up to 15 feet tall, her wall reliefs can span more than 14 feet wide. Kelly's sculpture & # 34; is based on her adherence to absolute simplicity and clarity of form & # 34;.
In the 1980s, during this period of his time in Spencertown, the artist devoted as much energy to his sculptures as to his paintings for the first time, eventually producing more than sixty percent of his 140 total sculptures in the process.
Kelly created her pieces using a succession of ideas in various forms. He could have started with a drawing, enhanced the drawing to create a print, taken the print and created a standalone piece, which then became a sculpture. Her sculptures are meant to be completely simple and can be seen quickly, often with just a glance. The viewer observes smooth and flat surfaces that are isolated from the space that surrounds them. This sense of simplicity and minimalism makes it difficult to tell the difference between foreground and background. Blue Disc was included in the seminal 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, titled First Structures, together with other much younger artists who began to work with minimal forms.
Style and influences
William Rubin noted that "Kelly's development had been directed resolutely inward: it was neither a reaction to Abstract Expressionism nor the result of a dialogue with his contemporaries." Many of his paintings they consist of a single color (usually bright), with some canvases that are irregular in shape, sometimes called "shaped canvases". The quality of the line seen in her paintings and in the shape of her shaped canvases is very subtle and implies perfection. This is demonstrated in his article Block Island Study (1959).
Kelly's experience in the military has been suggested as a source of the seriousness of his works. While in the Army, Kelly was exposed to and influenced by the camouflage that she worked with for her specific battalion. This taught him a lot about the use of form and shadow, as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible. It was central to her early education as an artist. Ralph Coburn, a friend of Kelly's from Boston, introduced her to the technique of automatic drawing during her visit to Paris. Kelly embraced this technique of making an image without looking at the sheet of paper. These techniques helped Kelly loosen his drawing style and broadened his acceptance of what he believed to be art.During his last year in Paris, Kelly was ill and also suffered from depression; Sims thought this influenced his predominant use of black and white during this period.
Kelly's admiration for Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso is evident in her work. She was trained to see things in various ways and work in different mediums due to her inspiration. Piet Mondrian influenced the non-objective forms that she used in both her paintings and her sculptures. Kelly was first influenced by the art and architecture of the Romanesque and Byzantine eras while studying in Paris. His introduction to surrealism and neoplasticism influenced his work and led him to try abstracting geometric shapes.
Collections
In 1957, the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased a painting, Atlantic, showing two wave-shaped white arches against solid black; it was the museum's first purchase of Kelly's work. Today, her work is in many public collections, including those of the Pompidou Center, Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, NY and Tate Modern, London. In 1999, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced that it had purchased 22 works—paintings, reliefs, and sculptures—by Ellsworth Kelly. They have been valued at more than $20 million. In 2003, the Menil Collection received Kelly's work Tablet, 188 framed works on paper, including sketches, preparatory drawings, and collages. Among the collectors Notable privateers include, among others, Eli Broad and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Barcelona is home to some of Kelly's sculptures. In 1987, a Kelly monolith was installed on the access ramp to Parque de la Creueta del Coll. The base of the Corten steel piece, called the Totem, is smaller than the upper part. In the same year, in the Barcelona neighborhood of La Sagrera, the Plaza del General Moragues was conditioned next to the Bac de Roda bridge with two Kelly pieces: a monolith and a dihedral. The monolith, 15 m high and made of stainless steel, stands out for its vertical lines with a slight curve while the cotten steel dihedral is fin-shaped.
Monolith to the Coll Crew Park
Monolith in General Moragues Square
Diedro in General Moragues Square
Acknowledgments
- 1963: Brandeis Creative Arts Award, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
- 1964: Carnegie International
- 1974: Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters
- 1987: Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
- 2000: Praemium Imperiale
- 2013: Doctor honoris cause of human letters, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
- 2013: National Medal of Arts, presented by the President of the United States
Kelly also received numerous honorary degrees, including from Bard College (1996), Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; [65] the Royal College of Art, London (1997); Harvard University, Cambridge (2003); and Williams College (2005).
Art market
He was first given a solo show by dealer Betty Parsons in 1956. In 1965, after nearly a decade with Parsons, he began exhibiting with the Sidney Janis Gallery. In the 1970s and 1980s, his work was managed jointly by Leo Castelli and Blum Helman in New York. In 1992, he joined the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London. The façade of Marks' Los Angeles gallery was inspired by the Study for Black and White Panels, a collage he made while living in Paris in 1954, and a painting, Black Over White . [67] From 1964 he produced prints and sculptures at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and Tyler Graphics Ltd near New York City.
In 2014, the painting Red Curve (1982) sold at auction for $4.5 million at Christie's, New York. The auction record for a Ellsworth Kelly's work was established by the 13-part painting Spectrum VI (1969), which sold for $5.2 million at Sotheby's, New York, on November 14, 2007.
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