Ellsworth Kelly
was born May 31, 1923, in Newburgh, New York. He studied at
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, from 1941 to 1943. After military
service from 1943 to 1945, he attended the School of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1946 to 1947. The
following year, Kelly went to France and enrolled at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the G.I. Bill, although
he attended classes infrequently. In France, he discovered
Romanesque art and architecture and Byzantine art. He was
also introduced to
Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism, which led
him to experiment with automatic drawing and geometric
abstraction.
Kelly abstracts the forms in his paintings from
observations of the real world, such as shadows cast by
trees or the spaces between architectural elements. In 1950,
Kelly met Jean Arp and that same year began to make
shaped-wood reliefs and collages in which elements were
arranged according to the laws of chance. He soon began to
make paintings in separate panels that can be recombined to
produce alternate compositions, as well as multipanel
paintings in which each canvas is painted a single color.
During the 1950s, he traveled throughout France, where he
met Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Alberto Magnelli,
Francis Picabia, and Georges Vantongerloo, among other
artists. His first solo show took place at the Galerie
Arnaud, Paris, in 1951.
Kelly returned to the United States in 1954, living first
in a studio apartment on Broad Street, and then at Coenties
Slip in lower Manhattan, where his neighbors would through
the years include Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, Fred
Mitchell, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack
Youngerman. Kelly continued to develop and expand the
vocabulary of painting, exploring issues of form and ground
with his flatly painted canvases. His first solo show in New
York was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956, and
three years later he was included in Sixteen Americans
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1958, he also
began to make freestanding sculptures. He moved out of
Manhattan in 1970, set up a studio in Chatham, and a home in
nearby Spencertown, New York.
Kelly’s first retrospective was held at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, in 1973. The following year, Kelly
began an ongoing series of totemic sculptures in steel and
aluminum. He traveled throughout Spain, Italy, and France in
1977, when his work was included in Documenta in
Kassel. He has executed many public commissions, including a
mural for UNESCO in Paris in 1969, sculpture for the city of
Barcelona in 1978, and a memorial for the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1993.
Kelly’s extensive work has been recognized in numerous
retrospective exhibitions, including a sculpture exhibition
at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982; an
exhibition of works on paper and a show of his print works
that traveled extensively in the United States and Canada
from 1987–88; and a career retrospective in 1996 organized
by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which
traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the
Tate Gallery, London; and the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Kelly
lives in Spencertown.