51 Facts About Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism.

Ellsworth Kelly's father was an insurance company executive of Scots-Irish and German descent.

Ellsworth Kelly's mother was a former schoolteacher of Welsh and Pennsylvania German stock.

Ellsworth Kelly's family moved from Newburgh to Oradell, New Jersey, a town of nearly 7,500 people.

Ellsworth Kelly's family lived near the Oradell Reservoir, where his paternal grandmother introduced him to ornithology when he was eight or nine years old.

Author Eugene Goossen speculated that the two- and three-color paintings for which Ellsworth Kelly is so well known can be traced to his bird watching and his study of the two- and three-color birds he saw so frequently at an early age.

Ellsworth Kelly was inducted at Fort Dix, New Jersey and sent to Camp Hale, Colorado, where he trained with mountain ski troops.

Ellsworth Kelly served with the unit from 1943 until the end of the European phase of the war.

Ellsworth Kelly attended classes infrequently, but immersed himself in the rich artistic resources of the French capital.

Ellsworth Kelly had heard a lecture by Max Beckmann on the French artist Paul Cezanne in 1948 and moved to Paris that year.

Ellsworth Kelly had become interested after reading a review of an Ad Reinhardt exhibit, an artist whose work he felt his work related to.

In May 1956 Ellsworth Kelly had his first New York City exhibition at Betty Parsons' gallery.

Ellsworth Kelly's art was considered more European than was popular in New York at the time.

Ellsworth Kelly showed again at her gallery in the fall of 1957.

Ellsworth Kelly's pieces were considered radically different from the other twenty-nine artists' works.

Ellsworth Kelly left New York City for Spencertown in 1970 and was joined there by his partner, photographer Jack Shear, in 1984.

From 2001 until his death Ellsworth Kelly worked in a 20,000-square-feet studio in Spencertown reconfigured and extended by the architect Richard Gluckman; the original studio had been designed by Schenectady-based architects Werner Feibes and James Schmitt in exchange for a site-specific painting Ellsworth Kelly created for them.

Austin, which Ellsworth Kelly designed thirty years prior, opened in February 2018.

Ellsworth Kelly died in Spencertown, New York on December 27,2015, aged 92.

Ellsworth Kelly 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.

Ellsworth Kelly's relief painting Blue Tablet, for example, was included in the seminal 1963 exhibition, Toward a New Abstraction, at the Jewish Museum.

In later paintings, Ellsworth Kelly distilled his palette and introduced new forms.

Ellsworth Kelly tendered drawings of plants and flowers from the late 1940s on.

Ellsworth Kelly took up printmaking in a concerted fashion in the mid-1960s, when he produced his Suite of Twenty-Seven Lithographs with Maeght Editeur in Paris.

In 1975, Ellsworth Kelly was the first artist to exhibit for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art's MATRIX series.

The exhibition displayed Ellsworth Kelly's Corn Stalk drawings series and two of his 1974 cor-ten steel sculptures.

In 1958, Ellsworth Kelly conceived one of his first wood sculptures, Concorde Relief I, a modestly scaled wall relief in elm, which explores the visual play and balance between two rectangular forms layered on top of each other, the uppermost with its top-right and lower-left corners removed.

Ellsworth Kelly made 30 sculptures in wood throughout his career.

Ellsworth Kelly gave up painted surfaces, instead choosing unvarnished steel, aluminum or bronze, often in totem-like configurations such as Curve XXIII.

Ellsworth Kelly created his pieces using a succession of ideas on various forms.

Ellsworth Kelly might have begun with a drawing, enhanced the drawing to create a print, taken the print and created a freestanding piece, which was then made into a sculpture.

Ellsworth Kelly's sculptures are meant to be entirely simple and can be viewed quickly, often only in one glance.

Ellsworth Kelly embraced this technique of making an image without looking at the sheet of paper.

Ellsworth Kelly trained himself to view things in various ways and work in different mediums because of their inspiration.

Ellsworth Kelly was first influenced by the art and architecture of the Romanesque and Byzantine eras while he was studying in Paris.

In 2014 Ellsworth Kelly organized a show of Matisse drawings at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

One of the reasons was Indiana's use of words in his paintings and Ellsworth Kelly considered such technique not worthy of high art.

Ellsworth Kelly was invited to show at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1961.

Ellsworth Kelly's work was later included in the documenta in 1964,1968,1977,1992.

Since then, solo exhibitions of Ellsworth Kelly's work have been mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1957 Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned to produce a 65-foot-long wall sculpture for the Transportation Building at Penn Center in Philadelphia, his largest work to that date.

In 2013 Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned the work "Spectrum VIII" a large-scale multi-panel painting serving as curtain for the Auditorium designed by Frank Gehry at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris.

Ellsworth Kelly's two-paneled Blue Black, 28 feet tall and made of painted honeycomb aluminum, was commissioned for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, and the large-scale bronze Untitled was commissioned specifically for the courtyard of the Phillips Collection.

In 2005, Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned with the only site-specific work for the Modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago by Renzo Piano.

Ellsworth Kelly created White Curve, the largest wall sculpture he has ever made, which is on display since 2009.

Ellsworth Kelly installed Berlin Totem, a 40 feet stainless-steel sculpture, in the courtyard of the Embassy of the United States, Berlin, in 2008.

In 1986 Ellsworth Kelly conceived his first free-standing building for a private collector, but it was never realized.

The sculpture titled Yellow Blue was inspired by the Empire State Plaza setting, and is Ellsworth Kelly's largest standing sculpture at nine feet high and nearly sixteen feet across.

Ellsworth Kelly has received numerous honorary degrees, among others from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Royal College of Art, London ; Harvard University, Cambridge ; and Williams College.

In 2014 Ellsworth Kelly's painting Red Curve sold at auction for $4.5 million at Christie's New York.

That auction record for a work by Ellsworth Kelly was set by the 13-part painting Spectrum VI, which sold for $5.2 million at Sotheby's New York, Contemporary Art Evening sale, November 14,2007.