Date: Fri 04-Jun-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: SARAH

Quick Words:

SFMOMA-Ellsworth-Kelly

Full Text:

SFMOMA Buys 20 Ellsworth Kelly Artworks

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. -- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced

today the acquisition of 22 important works by Ellsworth Kelly, drawn

exclusively from the artist's personal collection. Combined with the museum's

current holdings, they will form the single most important grouping of Kelly's

work. The acquisition represents one of the most extensive commitments any

museum has made to a living American artist, bringing together a body of work

that is reflective of the full span of Kelly's career. The acquisition is made

possible through gifts from several major supporters of the museum, who wish

to remain anonymous. Matthew Marks of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, played

an instrumental role in negotiations between the museum and the artist.

Regarding the sale of his pieces to SFMOMA, Ellsworth Kelly stated: "SFMOMA

has, with this acquisition, made an incredible commitment to my life's work,

for which I am deeply grateful. I have owned many of these works for almost 50

years and their placement has been of great concern to me."

The earliest painting in the group, "Self Portrait with Thorn," 1947, dates

from Kelly's student days at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

The artist represents himself holding an uprooted thorn bush, foreshadowing

his noted series of plant drawings throughout his career and evoking the

spiritual life journey on which he was embarking.

A pair of oil paintings, "Chuan-Shu," 1948, and "Seated Figure," 1949, reveal

the beginnings of Kelly's abstract explorations. Kelly moved to Paris in fall

1948 and spent much of his initial time there visiting museums and traveling

to various architectural landmarks. The influence of what he saw is evident in

these early works: elements of Picasso and the early European modernists, as

well as of the ethnic and tribal art he admired, are clearly visible. Perhaps

most telling, however, is Kelly's incorporation of iconic geometric forms --

circles, curves, triangular wedges -- even in his most representational work,

that foreshadow the forms that would develop in his more mature works decades

later.

"Window I," 1949, "Kilometer Marker," 1949, and "Mandorla," 1949, were created

the same year as "Seated Figure," yet they mark an important departure into

completely reductionist abstraction. While these works were executed on an

intimate scale (25« by 21 inches and 21 by 18 inches, respectively) relative

to Kelly's large later works, they constitute beautiful examples of what was

to become Kelly's signature practice of distilling an abstract form from an

everyday object, in these instances windows and compression of the image into

a shallow space, which would reappear in his later works.

Among Kelly's first forays into three dimensions is "White Relief," 1950.

Kelly himself has credited this work, together with "Window I," as leading to

the multi-panel paintings that dominated his work in the years immediately

following. "White Relief" was undertaken at an important creative juncture for

Kelly -- in June 1949, Kelly had met the composer John Cage, and six months

later, the artist Jean Arp. Both of these men were proponent of the I Ching

Chinese philosophy of chance as a governing force, which had a major impact on

how Kelly viewed composition and the role of the artist.

Over the following year, Kelly's experiments with chance compositions led to

the completion of a series entitled "La Combe," of which the third variation

is among the acquired works. "La Combe III," 1951, is notable for its bright,

linear patterns against solid white -- Kelly's first introduction of solid

areas of color -- and its lack of any fixed center of focus. "Cite," 1951, is

considered a benchmark work in Kelly's development. It takes the artist's

exploration of chance composition and abstraction further than the "La Combe"

series, employing 20 wood panels that were painted according to a dream the

artist had.

Kelly's experiments in chance collage led him to develop the role of color; as

he reduced the number of elements involved, color grew in importance. He was

interested in the idea that color does not define form but, in itself, becomes

form. Both "Spectrum I," 1953, and "Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance,"

1951-53, illustrate this period beautifully. While these works, especially the

latter, have led to comparisons with Mondrian's boogie-woogie-era works,

Kellly's painting avoided the absolute structure of Mondrian, allowing instead

each color to assert its own individuality -- a critical distinction that has

remained a foundation of Kelly's work. The multi-panel works that further

explored this premise, are represented in the group of acquisitions by "Red

Yellow Blue White and Black with White Border," 1953. The work presents seven

vertical panels with a "syncopated" rhythm that is certainly evocative of

Mondrian, yet the colors remain autonomous, with each panel defined by a white

border. Again, the scale of this work (41‹ by 155 inches) is considered fully

mature. "Gaza," 1952-56, is considered one of Kelly's last "Paris Era" works;

although realized in New York, the four-panel painting was based on a 1952

collage. The grand scale of this painting and its clear and bold expanses of

saturated color mark the shift from Paris to New York.

Kelly's return to the US marked an artistic turning point: Kelly moved

deliberately away from multi-panel works (which would reappear later) into

reliefs, in which the artist was able to explore with greater focus the

relationships of form color, curved and line, flatness and depth, figure and

ground. "White Relief," 1958, a small oil-on-wood relief, presents Kelly's

classic juxtaposition of curvilinear forms and straight lines, and of

monochromatic dimensionality. This work hearkens back to its namesake of 1950,

but the problem-solving in this case occurs on a much more focused level. In

"Concorde Relief I," 1958, another small-scale work, the two-level wood

surface remains unpainted -- itself a form of monochromaticism -- and the

exploration of the figure/ground relationship is further developed. This work

presages the large wood relief which Kelly would develop in the 1970s and

1980s. The aptly named "Wall," 1958, a large-scale oil on canvas, presents one

large solid black rectangular "figure" slightly skewed against a "ground" of

white. While the planes of these forms remain uniform on one canvas, the

effect is still one of relief, as the figure bumps up against the limits of

its ground. Kelly takes the experiment one step further with the name of this

work, implying that the wall itself forms the "ground" for the "figure" of the

painting.

"Black over Blue," 1963, is an important large-scale relief in aluminum that

dates from Kelly's show that year at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. In

this work, "Black" is a curved vertical shape that begins at the top of the

"Blue" ground, is mounted on and shoots downward well below the bottom edge of

the blue. This large relief appears to incorporate the very wall on which it

is mounted, extending Kelly's test of the boundaries of a canvas. "Blue Red,"

1966, explores planar relationships from a different perspective. This

"painting-cum-sculpture" consists of two large adjoining rectangular canvas

panels: the blue panel rests against wall and the red sits on floor. The

artist's use of canvas as a sculptural medium in this work begs comparison

with his hanging color/form studies of the same period, as exemplified by "Red

White," 1962, from the SFMOMA permanent collection, which juxtaposed the two

colors as forms on one plane.

In 1970, Kelly moved to a rural home in upstate New York. Twenty years after

his Paris "Window" studies, Kelly was inspired by seeing curves fragmented

through a window, but this time took the derivation to its most abstract form:

an arc whose ends are joined by angled straight lines to form a wedge, or in

Kelly's own direct terminology, a curve. Kelly's "Curve" series is among his

best-known work and is represented in the group of SFMOMA acquisitions by

"Curve XXI," 1978. As the series progressed, size, choice of material, its

thickness and patina became as critical to the success of each artwork as the

colors and shapes of his earlier pieces. "Curve XXI" is a later example, for

which Kelly chose the unusual medium of birchwood. "Diagonal with Curve,"

1978, a true relief, is both related to Kelly's "Curve" series as well as an

evocation of his earlier white reliefs.

Another important development for Kelly in the 1970s was the development of a

series of outdoor sculptures, which featured either severely horizontal or

vertical planes of steel and aluminum. Kelly created "Stele I," 1973 -- an

almost 20-foot vertical rounded rectangle of one-inch thick weathered steel --

for his own lawn, and it has never been publicly exhibited. "Stele I" will

make a striking partner to "Diagonal with Curve XIV," the extreme horizontal

steel sculpture given to SFMOMA by the artist in 1994.

The most recent work in the acquisition is among the most interesting from an

historical perspective. "Untitled (Mandorla)," 1988, is a wall-mounted bronze

sculpture of a large mandorla (pointed ellipsis) form. Its inspiration, the

1949 oil painting "Mandorla," is one of Kelly's earliest Paris works. Kelly

culled the mandorla shape from a cathedral window he had seen in his first

travels in France. Both works are in this group of acquisitions, in essence

bringing Kelly's oeuvre full circle -- via a window, no less.