I don’t
often think of the work of Ellsworth Kelly, except when I find one on a museum
wall or displayed in a sculpture park. Recently, on a visit to the National
Gallery in Washington D.C., I encountered a beautiful shaped canvas work (Blue
Violet Curve I (1982) see above), typical of the artist, abstract yet somehow
recalling a natural shape, reduced down to a few elemental forms and artistic
decisions.
In this
case, it was a work from the 1980s, when the artist was in his late 50s with
his own niche between the Abstract Expressionist movement that had captivated
world art since Jackson Pollock and minimalism that had led modern art since
the 1960s.
The work
to which I refer is small by Kelly’s standards, a mere 6x5 feet, consisting of
a blue arc on a white background. The first thing I noticed was the subtle yet
obvious optical illusion that the arc is actually a fan, the left side shorter
and thus appearing to tip away from the viewer. Of course the choice of
foreground or background is based solely on the optics of blue on white. In
fact, it could go either way: white foreground, blue background or blue
foreground, white background. In other words, it could depict a fan shape lying
flat on a white ground or a deep blue, limitless space, like the track of a
wind shield wiper revealing the sky.
This is
the kind of ambiguity in which Kelly revels. Much of his work since about 1950
is made of simple, beautifully rendered geometric shapes, in primary colors,
black and white. The magic is in the scale. The artist has the uncanny ability
to match the clearest shape with the optimum scale so that the works appear to
float, or “stand” as artists would phrase it. These works are stunning in any
architectural milieu that does not crowd them.
This is
an artist with an uncanny feel for scale and color and form. With no
discernible content, Kelly’s art is so good that one feels in the presence of a
master. Like all true masters, he is able to evoke wondrous things in simple
paint and canvas, pencil on paper and in steel.
A case in
point is the excellent steel rounded square at the Sculpture Garden at the
National Gallery (Stele II, 1973
(approximately 8 x 8 feet), see above). Floating above the lawn, this
painted steel work suggests an object like a kitchen utensil, giddily enlarged.
Because of its scale and its float, it is reborn as something beautiful that is
not a trope. The mystery here is in the shift from something mundane and
transitory to something immutable. A unique American master, Kelly makes
representations of perfection by means of the manipulation of materials that
would otherwise mean nothing.
