PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly: PAINTING AND SCULPTURE. New York: Betty Parsons Gallery, October 1959. Original edition. Exhibition announcement. Offset Lithograph [White Spiral], 15.5 x 10.75 inches printed recto only on an uncoated sheet. Two parallel creases from mailing [as issued], tiny pin holes to each corner and an additional fifth pinhole to lower edge. Raked lighting reveals faint handling evidence, but a very good copy of a rare survivor.
15.5 x 10.75 inch exhibition announcement for Kelly’s third show at the Betty Parsons Gallery from October 19 — November 7, 1959. This show was Kelly’s final exhibition before his career received an immeasurable boost via inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's ground-breaking Sixteen Americans exhibition from December 16, 1959 – February 17, 1960.
“Pioneering MoMA curator Dorothy Miller was renowned for her ability to scope out and promote innovative artistic talent, but even by her standards it was clear she had organized something extraordinary with 16 Americans. The 1959 exhibition was the fifth in the Americans series, which introduced exceptional contemporary American artists. In the accompanying catalogue, Miller mused that the show had an “unusually fresh, richly varied, vigorous, and youthful character.” The work on display was groundbreaking, even to the point of vexing some conservative critics, who dismissed as folly works such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine paintings, Jasper Johns’s flags and targets, and especially four nearly monochromatic black paintings by a 23-year-old Frank Stella. The chances Miller took paid rich dividends: while initially controversial, the work in this exhibition would set the stage for the eclecticism and experimentation of the decade to come and soon be established as iconic American art.” [Museum of Modern Art]
“The Betty Parsons Gallery opened in 1946 at 15 East 57th Street in Manhattan. The gallery regularly exhibited twelve shows a season, from September to May, with each show lasting only two to three weeks. At a time when the market for avant-garde American art was minuscule, Parsons was the only dealer willing to represent artists like Jackson Pollock after Peggy Guggenheim closed her Art of This Century gallery and returned to Europe in 1947. Parsons showed work by William Congdon, Clyfford Still, Theodoros Stamos, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, Forrest Bess, Michael Loew, Lyman Kipp, Judith Godwin, and Robert Rauschenberg among others. In 1950, she gave Barnett Newman, whom she had met in 1943, his first solo show; Rothko and Tony Smith assisted with the installation. In the late 1950s, Smith and Newman helped to remodel Parsons’ gallery, creating an almost cube-shaped main space framed by white walls with subtly curved corners and a concrete floor whose proportions fitted their ordered works. Helen Frankenthaler, the painter, who met Parsons in 1950, said, "Betty and her gallery helped construct the center of the art world. She was one of the last of her breed." Many of the Abstract Expressionist artists she had launched left her gallery for more commercial galleries such as Sam Kootz and Sidney Janis. Art critic B. H. Friedman noted, “She was resentful. She had struggled so long to get them established, and other dealers capitalized on her efforts.”
Ellsworth Kelly (American, May 31, 1923 – December 27, 2015) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
In May 1956 Kelly had his first New York City exhibition at Betty Parsons' gallery. His art was considered more European than was popular in New York at the time. He showed again at her gallery in the fall of 1957. Three of his pieces: Atlantic, Bar, and Painting in Three Panels, were selected for and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibit, "Young America 1957". His pieces were considered radically different from the other twenty-nine artists’ works.
While in Paris, Kelly had continued to paint the figure but by May 1949, he made his first abstract paintings. Observing how light dispersed on the surface of water, he painted Seine (1950), made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance. In 1951 he started a series of eight collages titled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII. He created it by using numbered slips of paper; each referred to a colour, one of eighteen different hues to be placed on a grid 40 inches by 40 inches. Each of the eight collages employed a different process.
Kelly's discovery in 1952 of Monet's late work infused him with a new freedom of painterly expression: he began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings. As a painter he worked from then on in an exclusively abstract mode. By the late 1950s, his painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work of this period also provided a useful bridge from the vanguard American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and 1970s.
“I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living. This an illusion, of course. Canvas rots. Paint changes color. But you keep trying to freeze the world as if you could make it last forever. In a sense, what I've tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.” — Ellsworth Kelly
“I realized I didn't want to compose pictures … I wanted to find them. I felt that my vision was choosing things out there in the world and presenting them. To me the investigation of perception was of the greatest interest. There was so much to see, and it all looked fantastic to me.”
Kelly's first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Arnaud, Paris, in 1951. His first solo show in New York was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956. In 1957, he showed works in a group exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. In 1959 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's ground-breaking exhibition, Sixteen Americans. Kelly was invited to show at the São Paulo Biennial in 1961. His work was later included in the documenta in 1964, 1968, 1977, 1992. A room of his paintings was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Kelly’s first retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. His work has since been recognized in numerous retrospective exhibitions, including a sculpture exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1982; an exhibition of works on paper and a show of his print works that traveled extensively in the United States and Canada from 1987–88; and a career retrospective in 1996 organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Since then, solo exhibitions of Kelly’s work have been mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge (1999), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988/2002), Philadelphia Museum of Art (2007), and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2007). [Wikipedia]