Floor 5: Ellsworth Kelly West (exiting Landing)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Ellsworth Kelly West Gallery. The gallery is warmly lit and Kelly's large, colorful, single- and multi-panel forms burst against the white walls of the space.
You've entered from the middle of the back wall of the wide, rectangular gallery, facing the long, far front wall. There are four paintings along the walls and a video about the artist on the back wall to your right.
There is a bench in the center of this gallery.
The exit to the Ellsworth Kelly South Gallery is in the front right corner. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"The form of my painting is the content."
—Ellsworth Kelly, 1990
Ellsworth Kelly (born 1923, Newburgh, New York; died 2015, Spencertown, New York) approached abstraction through careful looking. Many of his works began with isolated images that caught his eye—the outline of a windowsill, the contour of a leaf, the curve of a hill seen through a window.
Working through sketches or collages, Kelly then translated these observations into compositions. With their crisp, clearly articulated shapes and often vibrant planes of color, Kelly's paintings and sculptures hold their own as singular visual experiences. They have a commanding presence as physical objects in their own right, occupying real space and engaging the surrounding architecture.
The works on view in the next several galleries span the full six decades of Kelly's career. They include paintings and reliefs from his formative six years in Paris (1948–54), when he developed his strategy of using found, or "already made," forms, and the increasingly large, shaped and multi-panel paintings he made while in New York City (1954–69). The last gallery features the curved paintings and sculptures that Kelly began producing after moving to rural upstate New York in 1970. Throughout, his keen eye and sensitivity to the nuances of color, contour, shape, and proportion invite us to slow down and observe.
Related Media
Artwork Label Text
Ellsworth Kelly on abstraction.
SFMOMA interview (2014)
Single-channel video, with sound, 3:59 min.
Transcript
Ellsworth Kelly:
I have always lived in the present—present tense—and I think I'd like my paintings to be in the present tense. And I think I'd like my paintings to be in the present tense.
When I was young, I was with a bunch of kids running around on Halloween night, throwing tomatoes and all that kind of stuff. And in the darkness, I was looking at a window, and I saw a red shape, a blue shape, and a black shape. And I left the gang because I was interested. I said, I've got to find out what that is. And I looked in the window, and I couldn't find what I was looking at. It was just an ordinary room. And then, so I had to back up slowly. And then it was furniture, a curtain—blue, red. It's very close to seeing my first abstraction.
And when I got to Paris, I did some Picasso-type paintings, and figures at first, six months. But then I stopped. I said, you know, I didn’t come to Paris to be like the paintings that have been done. And I saw a show in which the paintings were quite small. And I saw the windows, which were about 15ft. And I kept saying, you know, I like these windows better than these paintings here. And I said, I have to have one. So I painted the window. I made it so big. I didn't want to tell anyone what it was. I felt that it wasn't really kosher to do something like that. But I began seeing things in Paris that I lifted. You know, I made drawings of things, ideas of structure.
Yes, La Combe developed from shadows on a staircase. I was fascinated by shadows. I felt like I was picking up something that was mysterious. I'm attracted to color and shape. I feel that people want a concept. They've always had a concept. You know, I mean, the figurative right away is a story, and abstraction has always been, “Oh, it's abstract.” I think my pictures need time. Time is very important with art. And, a show—even though it's a couple of weeks or sometimes a month—it's not enough time. You know, you go to the gallery once, you see it, ten minutes or so, and walk on.
I like to leave my paintings to be mysterious. I like them to be open. I feel like they have to be looked at; they have to be investigated, to be mysterious. I like them to be open. I feel like they have to be looked at. They have to be investigated.
I'm not figurative, but I'm completely abstract. You know, in a way that I think I found myself, I could just say, for instance: every day of the week I'm here at the studio. Something comes to my mind. I make a sketch of it. It's like the light bulb going on, you know, and I have to do it. And right now, since I'm on oxygen, I feel like it's very important. I still have work I have to do. This yellow painting over there is part of a painting that I'm doing. I definitely have to have that painting done in my lifetime.
Objects
4 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1956
Oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
The colorful bands in Gaza were inspired by a bus stop sign Kelly encountered in Paris in the early 1950s. He sketched what he saw, and subsequently translated it into a small collage. Four years later, after moving to New York, he used the collage as the basis for this large-format four-panel painting. The title refers to the Gaza Strip, which was in the news at the time due to the 1956 Suez Crisis—the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. The artist later recalled how the red and the two yellows made him think of the Red Sea and its sands.
"The joined panels became a form, and thereby transferred the ground from the surface of the painting to the wall. The result was a painting whose interest is not only in itself, but also in its relationship to things outside it."
—Ellsworth Kelly, 1990
Visual Description
A oil painting is composed of four wide rectangular canvas panels painted different hues of saturated yellow and orange stacked vertically—one on top of the other—and installed edge-to-edge, appearing as one joined-panel painting. The piece is higher than a tall adult, and about as wide as their outstretched arms. At the very top is a narrow panel of intense red-orange. Beneath it sits a similarly-sized bright yellow panel. This is followed by a taller panel painted golden-orange. Finally, at the bottom, the largest panel appears to repeat the same yellow as the second panel.
The horizontal divisions between panels are sharp and clean, though tiny irregularities may be perceived. Each of the canvases is painted flatly and uniformly, with no visible brushstrokes, textures, or modulation. The canvases are hung directly on the white gallery wall without a frame. The same color and treatment continues around to the canvases' visible edges.
Artwork Label Text
1996
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1996
In this 1996 work, which was commissioned by Doris and Don Fisher, Kelly returned to a format he had first explored in the mid-1960s: a series of identically sized rectangular panels, each painted a single color, spaced at regular intervals. The white wall of the exhibition space acts as a frame for the canvases and provides a visual rest between the colors. Depending on the given architectural conditions, Kelly would adjust the distance between the panels and the hanging height to ensure that the overall installation had the desired impact.
Visual Description
Four large, vertical, rectangular, oil-on-canvas panels—each as tall as a short adult, but narrower than their outstretched arms—are hung in a straight horizontal row on a white gallery wall. They are set apart about two feet from each other and are aligned at the top and bottom. Each canvas is a single color with crisp rectangular edges: starting from our left, a saturated ultramarine-like blue panel, a rich medium green panel, a deep, matte black panel third from left, and a vivid bright red panel at far right.
The panels are painted flatly and uniformly, with no visible brushstrokes, texture, or modulation. The same color and treatment continue around on the canvases’ visible edges. The canvases cast subtle shadows on the wall.
Artwork Label Text
1968
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1995
Kelly began making works composed of multiple joined panels, each one painted a single color, in the early 1950s. They evolved from self-contained rectangular formats like that of Gaza, across the gallery, to the dynamic joined shapes of this and Red Green, nearby. Simple at first glance, the paired geometric forms and contrasting colors create conflicting perceptions. The triangle and rectangle in Blue White, for example, may be read as two flat forms or as the representation of a single volume in perspective.
Visual Description
An oil painting about six feet tall by thirteen feet wide—about the height of a tall human and the length of an average car—is comprised of two shaped canvases joined together into one irregular shape; one canvas is painted white, and the other is painted a vibrant cobalt blue. The blue canvas, to the left, is a triangle, with a long flat bottom edge that runs parallel to the gallery floor and a sharp acute angle at the far left. The top and right side of the triangle meet above at a right angle. The short right side of the triangle meets and is joined to a smaller white rectangle.
Together, the two shapes create an irregular, four-sided polygon. Both panels are painted flatly and uniformly, with no visible brushstrokes, texture, or modulation. The same color and treatment continue around on the canvases’ visible edges. The canvases are set directly on the gallery wall without a frame, and cast subtle shadows on the wall.
Artwork Label Text
1968
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1994
Family Label: A perfect pair!
Ellsworth Kelly made two different canvas shapes to paint the colors red and green. See how each makes the other look brighter? Somehow, they belong together, like peanut butter and jelly. Can you think of other colors that go together?
Visual Description
A large oil painting—reaching three feet higher than a tall adult and spanning twice the width of their outstretched arms—is comprised of two trapezoidal-shaped canvases joined together, one painted a vibrant solid red and the other painted a vibrant solid green. The two are set directly on the white gallery wall without a frame. Both canvases have irregular, slightly trapezoidal shapes; the red panel, above and to the left, is smaller than the green panel. They abut one another to form a crisp diagonal line between the two colors. Together the two panels form one larger irregular trapezoid that is widest at the lower right green edge and narrowest at the top red edge.
Both are painted flatly and uniformly, with no visible brushstrokes, texture, or modulation. The same color and treatment continues around on the canvases' visible edges.