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Lot Essay
White Black (1962) is an important early work painted during Ellsworth Kelly’s first decade in New York City, where he lived in the Coenties Slip community alongside other artists including Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana and James Rosenquist. In 1963, it was included in his first solo museum exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., later travelling to the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston. The large square canvas is dominated by a field of black, which meets a white band sweeping from the upper left in a downward curve. The white shape is contoured further by a sliver of black at the upper right corner. The forms seem to imply their continuation, tapering or swelling, beyond the limits of the canvas, whose boundary creates tension with their painted edges. Sometimes misconstrued as a Hard Edge or Minimalist painter, Kelly’s approach was in fact distinctly sensual. Beginning with glimpses of form and shadow that he saw in the real world, he sought, through his distilled, impactful works, to capture the surprise, mysteries and pleasures of seeing.
Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York in 1923. His family later moved to Oradell, New Jersey, where his grandmother introduced him to ornithology at the age of eight or nine. The experience of watching birds in the wild, as well as a book of the prints of John James Audubon—with their vibrant tones, crisp edges and dynamic silhouettes—had a formative impact on his outlook. ‘My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colours’, Kelly recalled. ‘I said, “Jesus, a little blackbird with red wings.” That was one of the first birds I saw in the pine tree behind my house, and I followed it as he flew into one of the trees—like he was leading me on. In a way, that little bird seems to be responsible for all of my paintings’ (in conversation with G. Paltrow, Interview, 24 September 2011, online).
After studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Kelly joined the army in 1943. He was deployed to Paris as part of a camouflage battalion, and returned on the G.I. Bill in 1948. It was here—far from the Abstract Expressionist milieu of the New York School—that he refined his vision. He admired the Byzantine and Egyptian art in the Musée de Cluny, the Louvre and the Guimet, and visited Romanesque churches in western France. He met artists including Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Constantin Brâncuși and Alexander Calder. Experiments with automatic drawing, and the influence of his friend Jean Arp, who used elements of chance in his abstract collages and paintings, laid the way for an epiphany in 1949. Rather than composing, Kelly began to capture ‘ready-made’ fragments of his visual environment—a window, a shadow on a stairwell, the arch of a bridge, reflections on the Seine—which he translated into abstract paintings charged with revelatory life.
‘The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or a splatter of tar on a road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting’, Kelly remembered. ‘… I could take from everything; it all belonged to me’ (quoted in J. Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly, New York, 1971, pp. 20, 30). These indexical snapshots began as sketches or studies. Some would be developed straight away, others after a year or more: many provided themes that would be reworked repeatedly over the following decades. The white form in White Black, notes curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, can be found reprised at a different angle in the later bow-shaped canvas Diagonal with Curve VII (1978). The two works were both exhibited in Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2002.
Kelly returned to New York in 1954. Seen as something of an outsider, he struggled at first for recognition in an art world in thrall to the gestural, emotive work of painters such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. He found kindred spirits, however, in his neighbours at Coenties Slip, and in Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who worked nearby. In 1956 he began to exhibit at the storied Betty Parsons Gallery, and the following year his large-scale diptych Atlantic (1956) was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. That painting’s curving black and white forms, based on shadows cast across a book that Kelly was reading on a bus ride, are echoed in White Black. Kelly was drawn to the way shadows could vary in different conditions, holding mysterious depths or appearing almost solid: ‘in shadows’, he said, ‘you are in a new country’ (quoted in S. Whitfield, ‘Shaping Memory’, in Ellsworth Kelly, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006, p. 10).
While still informed by afterimages of the visual world, Kelly’s works of the late 1950s and early 1960s focused increasingly on modernist tensions between figure and ground, and between painted form and canvas edge. His black and white works, even more than their brightly-coloured counterparts, convey these ideas in their barest and most potent terms. ‘I’m interested’, Kelly said, ‘in the mass and colour, the black and white—the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be’ (quoted in D. Waldman, ‘Ellsworth Kelly’, in Ellsworth Kelly, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem, New York, 1996, p. 11). These works also became less geometric than those of his Paris period, often featuring curves and swells—‘voluptuous’ was a favourite word of Kelly’s—that addressed the viewer on the scale of their own body.
By now, Kelly had established the formal language that would serve him throughout his long career. He left Coenties Slip for a larger studio at the Hotel des Artistes on the Upper West Side in 1963, and moved upstate in 1970. He continued to make black and white paintings alongside reliefs, multi-panel works, sculptures and shaped canvas-objects across the following decades. Kelly also drew exquisite ink drawings of plants in parallel with his abstract practice. Works such as White Black are condensed and pristine, de-emphasising the artist’s hand: at the same time, they are tender, almost spiritual paeans to the transformative power of visual experience. The painting affirms a world full of wonder, from shifting shadows to the shape of a bird in flight.
Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York in 1923. His family later moved to Oradell, New Jersey, where his grandmother introduced him to ornithology at the age of eight or nine. The experience of watching birds in the wild, as well as a book of the prints of John James Audubon—with their vibrant tones, crisp edges and dynamic silhouettes—had a formative impact on his outlook. ‘My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colours’, Kelly recalled. ‘I said, “Jesus, a little blackbird with red wings.” That was one of the first birds I saw in the pine tree behind my house, and I followed it as he flew into one of the trees—like he was leading me on. In a way, that little bird seems to be responsible for all of my paintings’ (in conversation with G. Paltrow, Interview, 24 September 2011, online).
After studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Kelly joined the army in 1943. He was deployed to Paris as part of a camouflage battalion, and returned on the G.I. Bill in 1948. It was here—far from the Abstract Expressionist milieu of the New York School—that he refined his vision. He admired the Byzantine and Egyptian art in the Musée de Cluny, the Louvre and the Guimet, and visited Romanesque churches in western France. He met artists including Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Constantin Brâncuși and Alexander Calder. Experiments with automatic drawing, and the influence of his friend Jean Arp, who used elements of chance in his abstract collages and paintings, laid the way for an epiphany in 1949. Rather than composing, Kelly began to capture ‘ready-made’ fragments of his visual environment—a window, a shadow on a stairwell, the arch of a bridge, reflections on the Seine—which he translated into abstract paintings charged with revelatory life.
‘The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or a splatter of tar on a road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting’, Kelly remembered. ‘… I could take from everything; it all belonged to me’ (quoted in J. Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly, New York, 1971, pp. 20, 30). These indexical snapshots began as sketches or studies. Some would be developed straight away, others after a year or more: many provided themes that would be reworked repeatedly over the following decades. The white form in White Black, notes curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, can be found reprised at a different angle in the later bow-shaped canvas Diagonal with Curve VII (1978). The two works were both exhibited in Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2002.
Kelly returned to New York in 1954. Seen as something of an outsider, he struggled at first for recognition in an art world in thrall to the gestural, emotive work of painters such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. He found kindred spirits, however, in his neighbours at Coenties Slip, and in Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who worked nearby. In 1956 he began to exhibit at the storied Betty Parsons Gallery, and the following year his large-scale diptych Atlantic (1956) was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. That painting’s curving black and white forms, based on shadows cast across a book that Kelly was reading on a bus ride, are echoed in White Black. Kelly was drawn to the way shadows could vary in different conditions, holding mysterious depths or appearing almost solid: ‘in shadows’, he said, ‘you are in a new country’ (quoted in S. Whitfield, ‘Shaping Memory’, in Ellsworth Kelly, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006, p. 10).
While still informed by afterimages of the visual world, Kelly’s works of the late 1950s and early 1960s focused increasingly on modernist tensions between figure and ground, and between painted form and canvas edge. His black and white works, even more than their brightly-coloured counterparts, convey these ideas in their barest and most potent terms. ‘I’m interested’, Kelly said, ‘in the mass and colour, the black and white—the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be’ (quoted in D. Waldman, ‘Ellsworth Kelly’, in Ellsworth Kelly, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem, New York, 1996, p. 11). These works also became less geometric than those of his Paris period, often featuring curves and swells—‘voluptuous’ was a favourite word of Kelly’s—that addressed the viewer on the scale of their own body.
By now, Kelly had established the formal language that would serve him throughout his long career. He left Coenties Slip for a larger studio at the Hotel des Artistes on the Upper West Side in 1963, and moved upstate in 1970. He continued to make black and white paintings alongside reliefs, multi-panel works, sculptures and shaped canvas-objects across the following decades. Kelly also drew exquisite ink drawings of plants in parallel with his abstract practice. Works such as White Black are condensed and pristine, de-emphasising the artist’s hand: at the same time, they are tender, almost spiritual paeans to the transformative power of visual experience. The painting affirms a world full of wonder, from shifting shadows to the shape of a bird in flight.