Ellsworth Kelly: Expressionist Master

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.