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Lot Essay
One of the few paintings in Kelly’s body of work devoted to the beguiling shade of gray, Gray Panel II is an important early example from the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre. Painted in 1977, the canvas has been stretched into an undefinable and dynamic shape that is not quite rhomboid, rectangular or square. Marking a contrast with its irregular underlying structure, the surface of the painting has a smooth matt finish, bearing hardly a trace of the artist’s touch. Dating from the decade that Kelly had major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1979), and exhibited in the latter, Gray Panel II is testament to how Kelly’s elegant, energizing works radically reconceptualized what painting could be.
Kelly’s series of gray paintings were conceived in response to the Vietnam war. Throughout his career, Kelly more commonly used strong bright colors, white or black. “I don’t understand exactly how I choose color,” he said, speaking in an interview given towards the end of his life. “I like all colors, except for pale colors. I’ve done very few pink paintings, or light blue. But I do like gray. I’ve done a series of gray paintings. I know once during the Vietnam War I did a series of very colorful paintings in New York, and what people said was, “This is too cheerful. Who wants to see these happy colors right now with these awful headlines in the papers, and all the boys and women there in the war” So I said, “I’m a little ashamed that I’m so cheerful,” and the next set of paintings was all gray” (E. Kelly, quoted in A. Goldstein, “Ellsworth Kelly on His Singular Career, and the “Great Joy” of His Art,” Artspace, December 29, 2015).
Kelly had a profound belief in the power of color and form to provoke a direct emotional response in the viewer, irrelated to any representative subject matter. In this way, he emerges from the tradition of pre-war European abstraction—rooted in Roger Fry’s theory of “significant form”, and his interest in so-called ‘primitive’ art—and pulls it into the twentieth century. Intrigued by how one might strip painting back to its most basic vocabulary, Kelly began to rethink the structure of the canvas itself, questioning the relationship between figure and ground and eventually challenging the need for a painting to be a certain shape.
Although he made his first shaped canvas in 1966, a letter Kelly wrote to the composer John Cage in 1950 reveals that the ideas that would eventually lead to that radical gesture were percolating long before. Kelly wrote, “I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long—to hang on the walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures—they should be the wall—even better—on the outside wall of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern ‘icon.’ We must make our art like the Egyptians, the Chinese and the African & Island primitives—with their relation to life. It should meet the eye—direct…” (E. Kelly, quoted in G. Boehm, ‘In-Between Spaces,’ in Ellsworth Kelly, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Ostfilden-Ruit, 2002, p. 27).
Kelly’s series of gray paintings were conceived in response to the Vietnam war. Throughout his career, Kelly more commonly used strong bright colors, white or black. “I don’t understand exactly how I choose color,” he said, speaking in an interview given towards the end of his life. “I like all colors, except for pale colors. I’ve done very few pink paintings, or light blue. But I do like gray. I’ve done a series of gray paintings. I know once during the Vietnam War I did a series of very colorful paintings in New York, and what people said was, “This is too cheerful. Who wants to see these happy colors right now with these awful headlines in the papers, and all the boys and women there in the war” So I said, “I’m a little ashamed that I’m so cheerful,” and the next set of paintings was all gray” (E. Kelly, quoted in A. Goldstein, “Ellsworth Kelly on His Singular Career, and the “Great Joy” of His Art,” Artspace, December 29, 2015).
Kelly had a profound belief in the power of color and form to provoke a direct emotional response in the viewer, irrelated to any representative subject matter. In this way, he emerges from the tradition of pre-war European abstraction—rooted in Roger Fry’s theory of “significant form”, and his interest in so-called ‘primitive’ art—and pulls it into the twentieth century. Intrigued by how one might strip painting back to its most basic vocabulary, Kelly began to rethink the structure of the canvas itself, questioning the relationship between figure and ground and eventually challenging the need for a painting to be a certain shape.
Although he made his first shaped canvas in 1966, a letter Kelly wrote to the composer John Cage in 1950 reveals that the ideas that would eventually lead to that radical gesture were percolating long before. Kelly wrote, “I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long—to hang on the walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures—they should be the wall—even better—on the outside wall of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern ‘icon.’ We must make our art like the Egyptians, the Chinese and the African & Island primitives—with their relation to life. It should meet the eye—direct…” (E. Kelly, quoted in G. Boehm, ‘In-Between Spaces,’ in Ellsworth Kelly, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Ostfilden-Ruit, 2002, p. 27).