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ELLSWORTH KELLY (b. 1923)
Blue Green I (EK401)
signed with initials and dated 1968 on the overlaps
oil on canvas, two joined panels
91 by 91in. 231.1 by 231.1cm.
PROVENANCE
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Inmot Corporation, New York
Galerie Skulima, Berlin
Private Collection, Berlin
Vivian Horan Fine Art, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1983
EXHIBITED
New York, Sidney Janis, Ellsworth Kelly, October-November 1968, cat. no. 14
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Ellsworth Kelly, September-November 1973, p. 84, illustrated in color
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Three Decades: The Oliver-Hoffmann Collection, December 1988-February 1989, p. 35, illustrated in color
LITERATURE
John Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly, New York, 1971, pl. 210, illustrated
Diane Waldman, Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1996, fig. no. 14, p. 46, illustrated in color
Throughout his development as an artist, Kelly's choices produced an instinctive art that is singular among his contemporaries. In the exuberant age of Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism, where the process of painting was paramount, Kelly's abstract art was altogether more comtemplative and introspective, with the process of seeing in the ascendant. Blue Green I, 1968, is a reductivist and geometric expression of how Kelly saw the world around him - the shapes, the lines and the colors all in their purest and most immediate sense.
In 1968, Kelly started to experiment with the overall shape of his paintings. As early as his time in Paris in the 1950s, Kelly had worked extensively on multi-panel paintings, as a literal, anti-illusionist means of depicting space through the division of monochromatic surfaces. Addressing the canvas as a structured object, and not an area of gesture, Kelly proceeded to add dimension with his new exploration of shaped canvases in works such as Blue Green I and Yellow Orange, Made of shapes within shapes and painted in colors that juxtapose advancing and receding visual effects, these paintings set up contradictory perceptions and visual paradoxes for the viewer to contemplate. Is Blue Green I a depiction of a three-dimensional cube or of two individual, yet interlocked, geometric entities?
Kelly's interest in playing with the viewer's perceptions of space can be traced throughout much of his oeuvre. In his student days, Kelly was more responsive to contour drawing rather than academic shading of volume, recalling his army experiences as a camouflagist. The concern for
disguising contours heightened Kelly's awareness of the telling shape of things. By 1965, Kelly had already begun to challenge the art historical boundaries between painting, relief and sculpture. Multipanel paintings installed three-dimensionally, such as Blue Red (1966), cross-inhabit the three media and establish themselves somewhere in between the traditional definitions of each. Although Kelly ultimately decided that such radical and literal projections of geometric shapes were better suited to free-standing aluminum sculptures, also of 1966, the experimentation brought a new rigour to his next paintings. "It was through the making of sculpture and cutting forms out of metal that I returned to making joined-panel works on canvas, in which the ground was eliminated." Whereas works such as the three-dimensional Blue Red test the definition of a painting as object, Blue Green I tests the limits of what visual elements will hold as a flat surface.
Within his self-imposed minimal artistic vocabulary, Kelly has succeeded in experimenting with perception without diluting what he considered to be the fundamental factors of artistic representation - color and form. It is not the process but the effect that interests Kelly and in Blue Green I this desired effect is one of visually perceived paradox and contradiction. Even when the artist has restricted himself to two geometrically pure forms and two fundamentally reduced primary colors, he has
maintained the ability to create a vision of flux.
Contrary to the belief of his wildly
gestural and expressionistic contemporaries, Kelly's passion for reduced form and color has consistently provided ample room for the artist's impeccable aesthetic and theoretical experimentation - Blue Green I acts as testament to this process of discovery.