Curated by Emily Wei Rales and Yuri Stone
ELLSWORTH KELLY, who would have been one hundred years old this year, was a maker of beautiful, exuberant things. He translated the flotsam of visual experience—a waistline, shadows cast on a stair, the colors of packaged construction paper—into objects that could be at once monumental and subtle. His process of collecting and elaborating upon source material was exhaustive; his output of finished works was massive. How could one mount a comprehensive retrospective of his work without clobbering viewers with its magnitude?
Glenstone chose a strategy of understated grandeur, with an exhibition that is huge (more than seventy works) yet uncrowded. Many selections come from museums outside of the United States, such as Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949, and private collections, such as Kelly’s famous and infrequently shown painting of a Turkish loo, Toilette, 1949. (Toilette rewards special scrutiny; only in person can one see the two impasto swirls with which Kelly indicated the foot supports of the fixture while also suggesting the full cheeks of a face.)
The folding multipanel screen La Combe II, 1951, is displayed across the corner of a room as if to accentuate the angles of its composition and construction; its red-and-white, non-folding companion La Combe I, 1950, stands opposite the room, and one of Kelly’s photographs of stairs—much like the one from which he derived ready-made patterns for both compositions—is just down the hall.
The elegance of the exhibition is possible in part because large categories of Kelly’s production are reduced or excluded. Only a few of the works on display are drawings, and while several important photographs are present, there are few collages; the only preparatory sketches or archival material in the show accompany a single work (Yellow Curve, 1990). There are no lithographs. Early works that don’t readily fit into major exegetical trends in Kelly scholarship (like his portraits from 1950) do not appear. No designs for dresses or dancers’ costumes are included. Most heartbreaking is the omission of Kelly’s astonishing sketchbooks. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is showing those, along with the giant contrapuntal mural of aluminum panels that Kelly made for the Philadelphia Transportation Building in 1957.)
These exclusions render invisible the cycles of formal discovery and elaboration that informed much of Kelly’s practice, though they are perhaps unavoidable given the sheer size of the artist’s output. And with its economical selection of major works, Glenstone provides Kelly’s art ample space to breathe. The museum’s pavilion architecture, with its high concrete ceilings and serene clerestories, is especially hospitable to Kelly’s large, stand-alone works, particularly those that stretch across the wall, like Diagonal with Curve XV, 1984, whose arc seems continued by Red Curve VI, 1982, when viewed through a doorway from an adjacent room.
The uncluttered installation also makes some of Kelly’s intentionally compressed pieces more notable. The relatively narrow spaces that the artist stipulated as the required distance between the elements of Painting in Three Panels, 1956, for example, could have been overlooked in the 1950s, when galleries hung canvases more closely together, but here, the work’s tight arrangement is so at odds with the rest of the exhibition that the negative space is unmistakably part of the composition. The viewer at Glenstone is thus encouraged to consider the subtle incongruities of the combined arrangement: to note that the two spaces between the paintings are not quite the same; that the red segment at the top of the yellow canvas is not quite congruent with the cropped-away segments of the black circle; that the lateral division of the central panel might read as a horizon because the top is blue and the bottom is green, but that this horizon does nothing to establish a unitary space or common gravity across the set. Canvases juxtaposed in this way could be in danger of reading as a narrative sequence (this effect is risked more explicitly by the billowing, tumbling shapes of Three Gray Panels, 1987, which is also on view) but instead appear as propositions about the somatic possibilities of form: largeness, salience, levity, slowness, or stability.
For all the quiddity and claim to self-evidence in Kelly’s work, the poetic ambiguities continue.
The relationship between a canvas and its surroundings is the chief concern of the exhibition’s showstopper, Yellow Curve, which was originally produced for Frankfurt’s Portikus and has here been exhibited in a custom room to reproduce the original installation. The Curve is dizzying. Not quite a standard section of a circle, it stretches forward and toward the right, prompting the viewer to contemplate the difference between knowing a shape and perceiving it. Meanwhile, because the painting takes up most of the floor in its small room, its yellow paint reflects onto the walls, making them glow. This is, in other words, a transitive object that, like many other works in this exhibition, absorbs the surrounding space within its composition while simultaneously expanding into it.
Not everything has been re-created from the original Portikus installation, however. Photographs of Yellow Curve as it was installed in 1990 document an object whose canvas sides are white; the sides of the curve shown at Glenstone, by contrast, are yellow. Differences like these can shift the function of a piece by Kelly dramatically. When the whole of Yellow Curve is the same hue, it spreads as a thick layer of color that is sensuously present in real space. When the yellow expanse is restricted to the topmost two-dimensional surface, however, the object reads as a painting anomalously placed on the floor and enacts conflicts among the medium, its remnants of pictorial surface, and the conventions of its physical display.
A different room at Glenstone is dedicated to discerning the paragone in Kelly’s objects. There, objects made of wood hang on separate walls: The modestly sized Pair of Wood Reliefs and Concorde Relief I, both 1958, oppose the thick slab of the red-oak Diagonal with Curve XV, across the room. These are objects that visibly put the materiality of the wood to work: The grain of the elm used in Concorde Relief I affirms the vertical orientation of the panel, even when the angled plane of the carved relief slants off course; each terminus of Diagonal with Curve XV cuts through a knot from the wood, making the anomaly visible from both the front and the side. Between them stands Untitled, 1988. A much darker brown than the objects that flank it, Untitled could be mistaken (and was mistaken by several viewers) for a plank of dark, stained wood, especially as its one-inch thickness is a standard dimension of milled lumber. It is, of course, bronze, as anyone who has seen it at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, knows, but in the context of the Glenstone installation, placed in proximity to pieces in elm and oak, it obtains a trans-medium valence, hovering not so much between painting and sculpture as between historically reified materials of sculpture (wood and bronze).
That is the continuing reward of Kelly’s work—that for all its quiddity and its claim to self-evidence, the poetic ambiguities continue. Consider Painting for a White Wall, 1952, an early work in which Kelly tested painting’s relationship to its surroundings. The panels lack frames that would establish their autonomy; instead, they cast shadows directly on the wall according to lighting conditions in the space. The white panel seems to mimic the white wall of the gallery, but because it was made with artist’s oil paint on canvas, its chromatic effect is unlikely ever to match any architectural surface. The ultimate ambiguity of this piece, however, has emerged through decades of disagreement about one of its colors. Kelly famously stated that a child passing by initially ratified the work by naming its colors “black—rose—orange—white—blue—blue—white—orange—rose—black.” Richard Shiff, in his most recent publication, agrees that the first panel is black. Yet Eugene Goossen praised the chromatic workings of the painting in 1973 by noting that the leftmost panel’s “purplish blue” contrasted with the brighter blue on the other end.
One might suspect that Goossen was studying an inferior photographic reproduction while writing, except that in 1992, Yve-Alain Bois similarly described that first panel as a “dark blue” and allowed that its color “was hard to perceive even in normal viewing conditions, [and] probably could not have been grasped [by the child in] the street.” Bois elaborated on his correction years later by explaining that Kelly’s colors derived from industrial preprinted paper for schoolchildren, noting, “If you had gone to French schools in the ’50s or even ’60s, you’d recognize them when seeing the paintings.” It is curious that the boy of Kelly’s recollection was not sufficiently familiar with the conventions of school papers to recognize the obvious color, no matter the lighting. It is even more curious that Kelly’s original assertion that the panel is black could be considered incorrect by others (he did, after all, buy containers of paint that would have been labeled noir or bleu foncé). Such vicissitudes of color and the paradigms that govern the hues we perceive (Goossen’s aesthetic appraisal of a balanced composition; Bois’s ethos of the anti-compositional, tinged with some autobiographical urgency) richly exemplify the paradox of Kelly’s work: It presents as straightforward while remaining elusive. I do not know how to lock down the color of that dark panel with a name. Like the best of Kelly’s work, its hue is an artifact of a past moment that has made its way to the present as a living thing that is vibrantly unfixed.
“Ellsworth Kelly at 100” is on view through March 2024; travels to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, spring 2024; Fire Station, Doha, Qatar, fall 2024.
Sarah K. Rich is an associate professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University.
