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Please fix the spelling of the name
The middle initial for Clare Bell is P, not ... Read more

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Book Description

Ellsworth Kelly's oeuvre can perhaps best be summed up by a phrase from Gottfried Boehm: "In between: this is the shortest formula of his aesthetics." With abstract expressionism at its peak, and based on the traditions of the abstract avant-garde in dialogue with color field painting, Kelly developed a vocabulary that left panel painting behind. In a conscious questioning of the conditions that underlie perception, he not only explores the relationships of painting and wall, sculpture and space, but also, and in particular, the relationship between viewer and work. A selection of more than 40 pieces of art from the past five decades, most of them from the collection of the artist, this book offers an expert investigation into the artistic development of one of the leading exponents of international postwar art.

Essays by Gottfried Boehm and Viola Weigel.

Hardcover, 11 x 12.5 in.168 pages, 70 color & 10 b/w illustrations ... Read more

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Hardcover with dust jacket. 40 color plates. 3 black and white plates. ... Read more

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Think of an Ellsworth Kelly: an abstract consideration of the relationship between figure and ground; a conscious questioning of the conditions that underlie perception; an exploration of the relationship of painting and wall, sculpture and space, viewer and work. Now think of Ellsworth Kelly: a man, born in the 1920s in New York state, who has been recording his own appearance in ink and graphite over the years, capturing himself as his attitudes changed, his self-perception changed, his face and body aged. Collected here are five decades of Kelly's self-portraits, drawn between 1944 and 1992. The artist sketches himself in all variety of poses: bust, standing, sitting, clothed, nude, laughing, serious, self-possessed. The style of drawing changes as frequently, from line drawing to cubist to comic to naturalistic. Taken together, they present a marvelous portrait of the artist as a man. Essay by Harry Cooper. Clothbound, 6.5 x 9 in./120 pgs / 53 color 0 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20368 ... Read more

Book Description

Red Green Blue is almost the title of a 1963 painting by Ellsworth Kelly. Red Blue Green, a monumental rectangular oil work, considered a crucial fulcrum point in the artist's career, represents Kelly's concerns about the tension between the figure and the ground, offering two precisely shaped and balanced red and blue forms set against a strongly contrasting green ground. Working within a strict set of limits, he created a string of similarly grand, powerful works and defined many of the ideas about line, form, and color that still drive his work today. These works, made from the late 50s to the mid-60s, established the artist's singular style and his reputation as one of the most innovative abstract painters of the latter half of the 20th century, one who boldly broke with the strictures of the abstract expressionist movement, which dominated painting in the United States in the 50s. Exploring the complex interplay of invented and real-world inspirations that led to this body of figure/ground paintings, this volume presents a selection of 21 major paintings and 36 related drawings, collages, and photographs from that time period, as well as a new painting from 2002 that reexamines related concerns.
Instead of making a picture that was an interpretation of a thing seen, or a picture of invented content, I found an object and "presented" it as itself alone. --Ellsworth Kelly

Edited by Toby Kamps and Julie Dunn.
Essays by Roberta Bernstein and Sarah K. Rich, Toby Kamps and Dave Hickey.
Introduction by Hugh M. Davies.

Hardcover ,10 x 12 in. 128 pages, 82 color, 6 b/willustrations ... Read more

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Ellsworth Kelly is one of this generation’s most important artists. Over the course of his career, Kelly has developed a special relationship with the city of Dallas and its art community, and major holdings of his work in all media can be found there. This handsomely designed book brings together works from the Dallas Museum of Art and private collections to present a select overview of his career, ranging from a youthful 1947 self-portrait drawing to a towering wood sculpture from the mid-1990s.

Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas offers a succinct survey of Kelly’s achievements in translating the visual world of the everyday into commanding paintings, sculpture, and works on paper—all of which demonstrate the artist’s groundbreaking use of form, line, color, and volume. Included are an introduction and essays on key works by Charles Wylie, Yve-Alain Bois, Robert Storr, and Wood Roberdeau. Together the images and text document one of the most consistently inventive and sustained careers of any American artist.

Charles Wylie is the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art; John R. Lane is the director of the Dallas Museum of Art; Yve-Alain Bois is Joseph Pulitzer Professor Modern Art and Chair, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University; Robert Storr is Rosalee Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and Wood Roberdeau is on staff in the contemporary art department at the Dallas Museum of Art.

This book is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art (May 15 to August 22, 2004).

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Yve-Alain Bois, the Harvard art historian, had an idea. He believed that through drawing, Ellsworth Kelly evolved "four different strategies for making art: chance, the transfer, the modular grid, and the monochrome panel, all of which served the overriding goal of developing an alternative to traditional composing that would be both radically inventive and stubbornly impersonal." So begins this thoughtfully conceived and beautifully produced catalog for an exhibition organized by the Harvard University Art Museums and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, that covers only an early, seven-year period in the life of this prolific abstract painter.

Bois's essay is filled with remarkable insights into Kelly's drawings and working methods during his sojourn in post-World War II France. Bois has an artist's mind: he refers to "the painter's attention to visual noise, to the 'insignificant' leftovers in the visual realm." And he explains what a rare, almost impossible luxury this "estrangement" from the world would have been for ordinary French citizens during reconstruction.

Brilliant and nourishing though Bois's essay is, however, it is appropriately upstaged by the impeccably reproduced drawings, collages, and paintings on paper, which leave the reader breathless. These studies are like fireworks: they explode in dozens of directions, putting the viewer in mind of artists as disparate as Barnett Newman, Howard Hodgkin, Henri Matisse, David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, and Brice Marden. The book opens with the typical young artist's drawing of his work table, then quickly shifts to the most extraordinary seaweed drawing, with a second one in gouache, giving pause to any reader who thought Kelly's much later leaf drawings fell from nowhere. There are, of course, the colored grids (Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance), the cut-up grids such as the sketch for Cite, a study for Yellow on Yellow, and nearly 200 other color plates, all reproduced with the kind of accuracy that allows you to imagine you've held them in your hands.

This is a book that even before it's opened looks as if it might be essential, especially for artists. Hundreds of pages later, that first impression is amply confirmed. --Peggy Moorman ... Read more

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Brilliant and important, breathtakingly original
It's so rare to find a scholar whose writing illuminates works of art rather than clouds with obfuscation. Bois brings so much to the table intellectually, and then with wonderful clarity and elegant prose he teaches us to see Kelly's work in a splendid, exciting way. ... Read more

Book Description

This sweeping overview of Ellsworth Kelly's fifty-year career is the first to bring together the twenty-two pieces the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired from Kelly's personal collection in May 1999. The volume also includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and reliefs from the Museum's previous holdings and private collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary text by Madeleine Grynsztejn explores the evolution of Kelly's artwork, his longstanding interest in the phenomenology of vision, and his experimentation with compositions generated by the laws of chance. Additional essays by Julian Myers examine key issues and groupings of works, from Kelly's early figural paintings through the shaped panels and relief paintings for which the artist is best known. Produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco is an elegant presentation of the most significant collection of the artist's work. It secures Kelly's place as one of the most original of American artists. Kelly's paintings and sculptures are recognized as vital to the evolution of postwar Modernism. One of the chief proponents of hard-edge abstraction during the 1950s, he is also celebrated for his large-scale monochrome canvases. In 1956, Kelly gained critical recognition when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased his work and the Betty Parsons gallery presented his first solo exhibition in the U.S. From the 1970s to the present, the scale of Kelly's work increased as he joined canvases of different sizes and shapes into asymmetrical formats and created totems in bronze, wood, and steel. From 1996 to 1998 the artist's work traveled to museums in Los Angeles, London, and Munich. Today Kelly's works are represented in museums and private collections worldwide, and he has received several prestigious awards and honorary degrees. 70 color photographs, 21 b/w photographs ... Read more

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Essays by Dave Hickey and James Meyer. Two volumes in a slip case. 34 color plates. 68 pages. ... Read more

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Spectacular 20th Century Collection
Shows the works of the 5 prominent American Artist of the late 20th century ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from New Statesman (1996), published by New Statesman, Ltd. on September 12, 1997. The length of the article is 2505 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: The obvious and transparent relationship between a painting and its title is not discernible when considering abstract paintings. Abstract paintings often represent nothing. This is very evident in the works of Ellsworth Kelly.

Citation Details
Title: Never judge a picture by its title, especially when it's called "Untitled" or "Red Yellow Blue White and Black." (abstract paintings)
Author: Stuart Jeffries
Publication: New Statesman (1996) (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 12, 1997
Publisher: New Statesman, Ltd.
Volume: v126Issue: n4351Page: p38(3)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings. Essay by John Ashbery. 1992. Wraps. 30 plates. ... Read more