Abstract Expressionism was taking shape in the U.S., but Kelly's physical distance allowed him to develop his style away from its dominating influence. Bill, he returned to Paris and began a six-year stay. His visual experiences with camouflage and shadows, as well as his short time in Paris strongly impacted Kelly's aesthetic and future career path.Īfter his army discharge in 1945, Kelly studied at the Boston Museum of the Fine Arts School for two years, where his work was largely figurative and classical. While in the army, Kelly served in France, England and Germany, including a brief stay in Paris. The unit's task was to misdirect enemy soldiers with inflatable tanks. In 1943, Kelly enlisted in the army and joined the camouflage unit called "the Ghost Army," which had among its members many artists and designers. His parents, an insurance company executive and a teacher, were practical and supported his art career only if he pursued this technical training. After graduating from high school, he studied technical art and design at the Pratt Institute from 1941-1942. These observations of nature would later inform his unique way of creating and looking at art. He grew up in northern New Jersey, where he spent much of his time alone, often watching birds and insects. ©Estate of Ellsworth Kelly - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Doris and Donald Fisher Collectionīorn in Newburgh, New York in 1923, Ellsworth Kelly was the second of three boys. Wall, artwork, and space itself become nearly equally important aspects of the viewer's experience, finally leading to a heightened awareness of one's own body as a similar, energized "gesture" in the same architectural setting. In Black over Blue, the curved, black panel extends beyond the confines of the rectangular blue canvas, making the surrounding wall an essential part of the composition. In fact, the painting's interaction with the wall was a strong focus for Kelly. His paintings are often hung away from the wall, giving them a three-dimensional, sculptural quality. Black over Blue, first exhibited in the Betty Parsons Gallery, reflects his recurring interest in both layered works and non-traditionally shaped canvases. Upon returning to New York after six influential years in Paris, Kelly progressed beyond his multiple-panel paintings to reliefs. ©Estate of Ellsworth Kelly - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection Such efforts to reduce the artist's emotions, influence, or individual marks have been important facets of Kelly's artwork, suggesting that all apparently "controlled" creativity is always partly a matter of an artist's making the most of chance collisions with unexpected and impersonal forces. Although his artistic decisions ultimately dictate the final composition, Kelly's use of chance partially disconnects him from the resulting work. After rearranging it once more, he connected the panels into the final painting. He then turned this composition upside down and painted it onto twenty wood panels. For Cite, Kelly cut a black and white brushstroke drawing into twenty squares and randomly rearranged the pieces. In Paris, artists such as John Cage and Hans Arp encouraged Kelly to experiment with the idea of chance in his artwork. The special camouflage unit of which Kelly was a part during his service in World War II, and the principles of visual scrambling he undertook, has also contributed greatly to Kelly's intense visual motifs. In this sense, Kelly continues Henri Matisse's lyrical and decorative ideal of creating an art of visual serenity, even as the painted motif is now reduced to its simplest and sometimes most mysterious configuration. The subtle fluctuation between the meditative, decorative and industrial in much of Kelly's work can be traced in part to this design training in art school.As did the early-20 th-century Dadaists, Kelly delights in the spontaneous, the casual, and the ephemeral means of finding such readymade subjects. Real-life observations are the backbone of Kelly's abstraction works, which are replications of the shapes, shadows, and other visual sensations he experiences in the world around him.He encourages a kind of silent encounter, or bodily participation by the viewer with the artwork, chiefly by presenting bold and contrasting colors free of gestural brushstrokes or recognizable imagery, panels protruding gracefully from the wall, and irregular forms inhabiting space as confidently as the viewer before them. Kelly intends for viewers to experience his artwork with instinctive, physical responses to the work's structure, color, and surrounding space rather than with contextual or interpretive analysis.
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