Kelly, Ellsworth

Kelly, Ellsworth (1923- ), American abstract painter, sculptor, and printmaker, best known for his experiments with colour.

Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York State, and studied at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn from 1941 until 1943. After a period in the US army, he spent a year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, before enrolling at the École des Beaux-Art, Paris. His attendance there was infrequent, but while in France he became interested in Romanesque and Byzantine art, as well as Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism. He travelled throughout France during the 1950s and met artists such as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Francis Picabia. In 1954 he returned to the United States and began to establish himself in Manhattan; by 1959 he was included in the Sixteen Americans exhibition put on by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Many of his paintings from the 1950s consist simply of an abstract, carefully defined patch of bright colour on a neutral background. Kelly also produced some of the earliest shaped canvases, in which a canvas is stretched over a three-dimensional framework to create the desired shape beneath the paint. His best-known later works have been his panel paintings, which consist of several canvases, sometimes as many as 64, joined together; each canvas is painted a different and brilliantly intense colour, creating a vibrant, carefully balanced whole. Kelly is also known for his sculptures, which can be free-standing or in relief, and are frequently made from painted cut-out shapes, often in metal. From the 1970s he created a series of totems. In 1956 he was commissioned to do a piece for Philadelphia’s Transportation Building, which resulted in Sculpture for a Large Wall (1957) and since then other high-profile commissions have included a mural for UNESCO in Paris (1969), a sculpture for the city of Barcelona (1978), and a memorial for the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. (1993).

Kelly’s works are now found in museums and private collections around the world. Retrospectives of his work have been shown in many of the world’s top museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in New York, Tate Gallery, London, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.