Ellsworth Kelly (1923)

Aliases: Elsworth Kelly

Professions: Painter; Sculptor

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  l - Ellsworth Kelly , b. 1923 Spectrum VI oil on canvas in thirteen parts

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  l - Ellsworth Kelly , Black Venus (EK227)

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  l - ELLSWORTH KELLY

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  Ellsworth Kelly , b. 1923 Black White (EK400) oil on canvas in two joined panels

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Ellsworth Kelly Biography

(b Newburgh, NY, 31 May 1923). American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was one of the major practitioners of abstract art in the USA after World War II; as early as the 1950s he developed an individual approach that influenced the course of Minimal art, colour field painting, hard-edge painting and Post-painterly Abstraction without becoming fully a part of any of these movements. He was encouraged at high school by a sympathetic art teacher, although his parents were reluctant for him to be an artist and agreed to support only his training in the technical arts, which he pursued at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (1941–2). In 1943 he was inducted in the US Army where, at his request, he was assigned to the camouflage unit. In 1944 he travelled to Europe, where a short stay in Paris inspired him to return to France at the end of the decade. Following his military discharge (1945), he studied at the Boston Museum of the Fine Arts School (1946–7). With the support of a US education grant on the G.I. Bill, he returned in 1948 to Paris, using it as a European base for six years. During this period he made a trip to Colmar to see Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece; the construction of his later painting may have been prompted in part by its multi-panel format.

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