News — Dec 28, 2015

The Stedelijk Museum mourns the loss of Ellsworth Kelly (1923-27 December 2015), one of the most distinguished American Abstract painters. Kelly’s paintings are built up of large, simple, sharply delineated straight and curved shapes rendered in strong hues or composed of monochrome panels. The Stedelijk holdings contain five paintings characteristic of his oeuvre, a dozen works on paper and a monumental sculpture by Kelly, the Blue Red Rocker of 1963, in the shape of a folded ellipse. The blue and red sculpture almost seems to vibrate, an effect evoked by the vividly contrasting primary colors.

Kelly creates a fascinating bridge between American and European art. His large formats are typically American but while living in Paris, between 1948 and 1954, he was also profoundly affected by European influences. Kelly learned to distil natural shapes into abstract forms from Matisse (Kelly made sensitive line drawings of leaves, in the spirit of Matisse), and to compose with colored geometrical shapes from Mondrian and other artists working in the geometric abstract tradition. But Kelly hailed the world as his prime source of inspiration: “forms in a cathedral vault or in a panel of asphalt on a roadway seemed more valuable and instructive, an experience more sensual than geometrical painting.”

In the paintings composed of monochrome panels, such as Black with White Bar II of 1971 in the Stedelijk collection, painted contours are replaced by the physical edges where the paintings meet. Not dissimilar to the relationship between the edges of the cut-out paper shapes in the collages of Matisse. Beginning in 1950, Kelly started to find physical separations more satisfying than those rendered in paint. With this, he anticipated the so-called Minimal Art of the nineteen sixties. “My painting presumes to be nothing more than what it is”, he says: “a painted surface and a support, color, and mass”. It may appear incredibly simple, but shape, color and dimensions are chosen with great care. His compositions possess enormous spatiality.

But his preference for deep black, intense white and bright colors also places Kelly in the tradition of Matisse; he distanced himself from the majority of American Abstract Expressionists, his contemporaries and countrymen. Kelly felt that they muddied their colors by mixing them and painting wet-in-wet.

With the exception of a screen-print gifted in 2003, all the Kelly works in the collection of the Stedelijk were acquired by former director Edy de Wilde, primarily in the nineteen sixties and seventies. De Wilde clearly grasped that the Kelly pieces are not only in step with one of the spearheads of his collection strategy, the American Abstract art of the nineteen fifties and sixties, but also forge an extraordinary connection between American and European icons in the collection, such as the large paper cut-out The Parakeet and the Mermaid by Matisse.

Ellsworth Kelly attained the impressive age of 92, and leaves behind an unprecedented legacy.

 

 

Maurice Rummens, Member of the Research Staff at the Stedelijk