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Lot Essay
Like the Precisionists, Kelly recognizes forms in everyday experience which have esthetic potential; seizing them out of context, he purifies and refines them, recreating them in the context of abstract art in order to possess them - Barbara Rose (quoted in “The Sculpture of Ellsworth Kelly,” Artforum, Summer 1967, p. 55).
A quiet titan of American art, Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Hard-Edge’ paintings brought about a new understanding of abstraction in the twentieth century. Blue Tablet is a striking example of the artist’s work from the early 1960s when his practice offered a tangible bridge between early American abstraction and the nascent Minimalist movement. His work with clearly defined forms on canvas became sculptural, as edges previously defined in paint were extended into three dimensions. Pulling inspiration from the world around him but never fully bowing to representational subjects, Kelly’s oeuvre highlighted the physical nature of the support and the power of color. “Like the Precisionists,” wrote art historian Barbara Rose, “Kelly recognizes forms in everyday experience which have esthetic potential; seizing them out of context, he purifies and refines them, recreating them in the context of abstract art in order to possess them” (B. Rose, “The Sculpture of Ellsworth Kelly,” Artforum, Summer 1967, p. 55). Blue Tablet was included in the seminal 1963 exhibition, Toward a New Abstraction, organized by the Jewish Museum in New York, which came to define the genre just as Pop Art was born. The same year the painting was also included in the artist’s Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings by Ellsworth Kelly exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, an indication of his growing reputation as a leader in his field. By parsing daily experience and marrying it with geometric purity, the present work set the stage for artistic innovations in the decades to come.
Defiantly square and massive in scale, Blue Tablet is representative of Kelly’s early geometric canvases that leveraged subtle shifts in the painted surface to create new ideas about objects on the wall and how they occupy space. Employing two joined canvases, the artist stacks one on top of the other so that the left side of the composition rises slightly above the right. The uppermost plane is exactly half the size of the entire work, and the resulting vertical divide cuts through the piece with a solemn gravity. The unadulterated, even surface is coated with layers of rich blue oil paint that belies its painstaking application. Nowhere is Kelly’s hand or brush present as the traditional mark of the artist is subsumed by the azure field. It is perhaps no coincidence that Andy Warhol introduced what has been termed a ‘blank’ canvas to his Death and Disaster paintings beginning with Blue Electric Chair in 1963, around the same time as the Jewish Museum exhibition, a show which Warhol surely visited.
While living in Paris after World War II, Kelly became keenly aware of the various architectural styles from past and present that coexisted throughout the city. Along with natural elements like trees and shadows, these minutiae became a source of inspiration for the young artist as he strayed beyond figuration and into abstraction. Rather than depicting these sources outright, they were extracted from their original context and cropped, simplified, and repurposed. Kelly transformed windows, cornices, and falling leaves into pure shapes that retained some semblance of their origins but never enough to be fully representational. Pairing this stylization with a tendency toward flat color and sharp edges, his canvases became poignant treatises on refreshing our vision of the everyday. “It’s nothing if it isn’t about something you haven’t seen before,” he once exclaimed (E. Kelly, quoted in E. C. Baker, Ellsworth Kelly: Recent Paintings and Sculptures, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 26-June 24, 1979, p. 8). Recognizing new shapes and images beyond the ordinary in his work, it is easy to find abstracted corollaries to our own lived experience. A shadow on a white wall, part of a leaf held stark against the sky, or the intersection of architectural elements seen in our periphery all bubble beneath the pristine surface of Kelly’s configurations.
A singularly original figure in the history of American art, Kelly set ideas in motion that would result in some of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century. Clearing the way for Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Hard-Edge Painting, among others, works like Blue Tablet prefaced these monumental developments by pushing abstraction beyond the realms of expression and into a careful critique of representation. Problematizing the relationship between the art object and its traditional role outside of the everyday, the artist brought the conversation down to earth. “The idea of the identity of the artwork as something that does not depict reality but rather coexists in the world with other things is integral to Kelly’s thinking and led to a kind of abstraction based entirely on shape and color" (R. Bernstein, cited in Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1996, p. 41). No longer were abstractions beholden to the unknowable emotion of the lone artist or some visual legacy based in decades of academic study. Instead, Kelly’s canvases stirred a more elemental urge to understand the visual world in terms of shape, color, and form.
A quiet titan of American art, Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Hard-Edge’ paintings brought about a new understanding of abstraction in the twentieth century. Blue Tablet is a striking example of the artist’s work from the early 1960s when his practice offered a tangible bridge between early American abstraction and the nascent Minimalist movement. His work with clearly defined forms on canvas became sculptural, as edges previously defined in paint were extended into three dimensions. Pulling inspiration from the world around him but never fully bowing to representational subjects, Kelly’s oeuvre highlighted the physical nature of the support and the power of color. “Like the Precisionists,” wrote art historian Barbara Rose, “Kelly recognizes forms in everyday experience which have esthetic potential; seizing them out of context, he purifies and refines them, recreating them in the context of abstract art in order to possess them” (B. Rose, “The Sculpture of Ellsworth Kelly,” Artforum, Summer 1967, p. 55). Blue Tablet was included in the seminal 1963 exhibition, Toward a New Abstraction, organized by the Jewish Museum in New York, which came to define the genre just as Pop Art was born. The same year the painting was also included in the artist’s Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings by Ellsworth Kelly exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, an indication of his growing reputation as a leader in his field. By parsing daily experience and marrying it with geometric purity, the present work set the stage for artistic innovations in the decades to come.
Defiantly square and massive in scale, Blue Tablet is representative of Kelly’s early geometric canvases that leveraged subtle shifts in the painted surface to create new ideas about objects on the wall and how they occupy space. Employing two joined canvases, the artist stacks one on top of the other so that the left side of the composition rises slightly above the right. The uppermost plane is exactly half the size of the entire work, and the resulting vertical divide cuts through the piece with a solemn gravity. The unadulterated, even surface is coated with layers of rich blue oil paint that belies its painstaking application. Nowhere is Kelly’s hand or brush present as the traditional mark of the artist is subsumed by the azure field. It is perhaps no coincidence that Andy Warhol introduced what has been termed a ‘blank’ canvas to his Death and Disaster paintings beginning with Blue Electric Chair in 1963, around the same time as the Jewish Museum exhibition, a show which Warhol surely visited.
While living in Paris after World War II, Kelly became keenly aware of the various architectural styles from past and present that coexisted throughout the city. Along with natural elements like trees and shadows, these minutiae became a source of inspiration for the young artist as he strayed beyond figuration and into abstraction. Rather than depicting these sources outright, they were extracted from their original context and cropped, simplified, and repurposed. Kelly transformed windows, cornices, and falling leaves into pure shapes that retained some semblance of their origins but never enough to be fully representational. Pairing this stylization with a tendency toward flat color and sharp edges, his canvases became poignant treatises on refreshing our vision of the everyday. “It’s nothing if it isn’t about something you haven’t seen before,” he once exclaimed (E. Kelly, quoted in E. C. Baker, Ellsworth Kelly: Recent Paintings and Sculptures, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 26-June 24, 1979, p. 8). Recognizing new shapes and images beyond the ordinary in his work, it is easy to find abstracted corollaries to our own lived experience. A shadow on a white wall, part of a leaf held stark against the sky, or the intersection of architectural elements seen in our periphery all bubble beneath the pristine surface of Kelly’s configurations.
A singularly original figure in the history of American art, Kelly set ideas in motion that would result in some of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century. Clearing the way for Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Hard-Edge Painting, among others, works like Blue Tablet prefaced these monumental developments by pushing abstraction beyond the realms of expression and into a careful critique of representation. Problematizing the relationship between the art object and its traditional role outside of the everyday, the artist brought the conversation down to earth. “The idea of the identity of the artwork as something that does not depict reality but rather coexists in the world with other things is integral to Kelly’s thinking and led to a kind of abstraction based entirely on shape and color" (R. Bernstein, cited in Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1996, p. 41). No longer were abstractions beholden to the unknowable emotion of the lone artist or some visual legacy based in decades of academic study. Instead, Kelly’s canvases stirred a more elemental urge to understand the visual world in terms of shape, color, and form.