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signed, dated 1968 and inscribed 405 on the stretcher

oil on canvas, two joined panels

PROVENANCE

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1968
EXHIBITED

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Paintings and Sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly, October - November 1968, cat. no. 18
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, October 1969 - February 1970, cat. no. 179, p. 202, illustrated
New York, Joseph Helman Gallery, Ellsworth Kelly Masterworks - Two-Panel Paintings, November 1998, cat. no. 8, illustrated in color
CATALOGUE NOTE

Ellsworth Kelly is an artist whose art defies art history by refusing to be linked to any one particular group or movement. His ideas transcend traditional boundaries and explore the basis of all art and architecture from the ancient Egyptians to the modernists of Europe, to his contemporaries in New York. Throughout his career, Kelly has been linked (albeit incorrectly) to Hard Edge painting, Op-Art, and most often Minimalist art. Although he may share some of the same artistic tendencies, such as reductive form and monochromatic use of color, Kelly's use of these approaches to painting predates them all. More applicable is the fact that Kelly was heavily influenced by artists in Europe, such as Mondrian, Malevich and Arp. However, where these artists were concerned with the idea of creating space and form with color and composition, Kelly has his own ideas about color. Color, plane and shape, independent of form, provide their own reality - Kelly's own reality - in a visual vocabulary that has remained fresh, exciting and intriguing to the viewer for over five decades. As Diane Waldman remarked, "Kelly combined his interests in ancient art and architecture with early twentieth-century Modernism to create a body of work that is a seamless blend of past and present, almost transcending time." (Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Ellsworth Kelly: a Retrospective, 1996, p. 11)

In the early 1960s, Kelly's experiments with color, line and shape were conducted within the rectangle of traditional easel painting. Circles are within squares and lines of color undulate across fields of solid color. By the end of the decade, Kelly burst beyond this boundary to establish one of his most important innovations as a painter. In 1968, the artist started to experiment with the overall shape of his paintings, expanding beyond the traditional square or rectangle to explore the relationships between the proportions of shape, color and weight. Kelly used multi-panel paintings as a literal, anti-illusionist means of depicting space through the division of discrete monochromatic surfaces.

In working on these associations, Kelly continued a technique he had begun in his early years in Paris in the early 1950s, during which time he visited many artists such as Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian. Most importantly, he became friendly with Jean Arp who introduced the young artist to the practice of using collage, a momentously important application for Kelly in his use of multi-panel paintings. Utilizing colored paper, postcards, and photographs, Kelly experimented with chance arrangements of fragments and refined his extreme simplification of components. In this process, his emphasis on color and mass became more pronounced.

White Dark Blue (EK 405) is a classic example of Kelly's paintings of the late 1960s with its dual chromatic tensions and its joined panel format - parameters that were the cornerstone of his painterly investigations. White Dark Blue (EK 405) is therefore a culmination of many of Kelly's early ideas and a portent of later series. The artist has addressed the canvas as a structured object, not an area of painterly gesture, with receding and advancing colors and shifting perceptions of weight. The horizon line between blue and white vibrates with tension of light and dark, void and mass, image and non-image. The triangle and trapezoid are experienced for the impact of their form alone, as condensed fragments of vision. With 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. Even with only two colors and two geometrically pure forms, White Dark Blue (EK 405) succeeds in drawing the viewer in to question the very idea of what a painting is and can be. Kelly has once again defined the space without dominating it and has beautifully and uniquely created his own 'reality of color'. In the presence of the painting, the white triangle can either recede or project from the wall, wavering between both potentialities. The blue trapezoid brings solidity to the work, acting as an anchor for the composition, while also suggestive of vast expanses, whether of sky or ocean.