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If you’re one of those grandparents who can’t distinguish between your grandchildren’s art and what’s on many gallery walls these days, you might take heart in the current show of Ellsworth Kelly at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Kelly, formally educated at some of the best schools on both sides of the ocean, believed in the random line, chance composition and brightly colored papers inside kindergartners’ backpacks. While in Paris, Kelly once was delighted to find a gummed paper used by French toddlers called papier gommette. It came in a huge stack of many colors and, in one exercise, Kelly cut the sheets into 1-inch squares – reportedly about 1,600 – and stuck them onto larger sheets, the color and placement being completely by chance. He even cut up the results and made them into panels and stripes, rearranging them to better the effect. Quelle nerve!
The exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: Paris/New York, 1949-1959" features works loaned by the artist and from private collections. It is comprised of about 39 paintings, collages and drawings created during the 10 years Kelly spent in the two cities.
Born in Newburgh, N.Y., in 1923, Kelly studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1941 to 1943. From 1945 to 1947, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He then lived in Paris for six years before returning to New York in 1954. While in France, he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and discovered Byzantine and Romanesque art and architecture. He also came upon Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism, which lead to experimentation with automatic writing and drawings, geometric abstraction and panels of single colors that could be shifted around to create different compositions.
During Kelly’s time in Europe he met such artists as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Alberto Magnelli, Francis Picabia and Georges Vantongerloo.
He gained a reputation and had his first solo show in Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951. Back in New York by 1954, he lived in lower Manhattan and was part of a major show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. He moved out of the city in 1970 and settled in Spencertown, N.Y.
Throughout his career, Kelly never ceased experimentation. He created steel and aluminum sculpture, painted murals and, in 1993, composed the memorial for the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. He has had numerous retrospectives dealing with his prints, sculptures and paintings.
Elaborating on these achievements, Philadelphia Museum of Art Director Anne d’Harnoncourt said of the current show, "[The works of art] trace Kelly’s artistic path in the early stages of his career and demonstrate why he is today considered one of the most eminent artists of our time."
Part of Kelly’s allure is the intelligence behind his work. He closely observes nature and abstracts it: the line of a shadow of a plant, the gap between tall buildings, the geometry of the grid, the span of bridges. From there, he took it even further, letting the lines decide which form would appear in his work. The chance, the random and the long-shot are more a part of nature than most of us can accept, but any scientist will attest to it. Giving up control is bringing it to bear in a chaotic world. If the most casual viewer today can’t sense the chaos, they are not trying hard enough.
Much is made of Kelly’s work as being connected to various other artists and movements. However, he mostly plowed his own row and the support and encouragement he received was not the cause of his own vision. His style was – and still is – based on a solid foundation of viewing the physical world with care and respect, then rendering the observation into an artistic statement.
Ellsworth Kelly: Paris/New York, 1949-1959
Through Aug. 13
Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Tickets: Adults, $12; age 62 and older and students, $9; age 13-18, $8; 12 and younger, free; Sundays, pay what you wish
www.philamuseum.org
