Why Ellsworth Kelly Was a Giant in the World of American Art

The artist’s minimalism put the essence of his subjects above all

By Alex Palmer

SMITHSONIAN.COM
DECEMBER 28, 2015

值得注意的是：

书法在与Ellsworth Kelly进行比较时，不可不将Calder/ Kelly包含在内，因为Ellsworth Kelly与Calder/Kelly有十分相似的艺术哲学。

I see the possible influence of Matisse's late paper works on the patterns and colorism on Kelley's work; not mentioned. "Sensual geometrics" are more reminiscent of Arp and Brancusi, than of Cezanne.

Ellsworth Kelly’s large-scale, monochromatic art works have been key innovations within several 20th century art movements, including Minimalism and Pop Art. Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923, and studied at The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He enlisted in the army between 1943 and 1945, after which he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He lived in Paris for six years, where he began to work abstractly, and by the time he returned to New York in 1954, he had garnered a great deal of critical attention. The artist evolved through a variety of approaches to abstraction throughout his career, and in the late 1950s he began to make the curvilinear “shaped” canvases for which he is best known. Kelly continued to make work at his Spencertown, NY, studio until he passed away in 2015 at the age of 92. The artist’s works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the Tate Modern, London. His oeuvre has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, and the Haus der Kunst, Munich.