Floor 5: Ellsworth Kelly West: QR Code 503
Overview
Objects
4 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
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 panels, around 5 feet tall, are hung in a straight horizontal row on a white wall, evenly spaced and aligned at the top and bottom. Each canvas is a single color with crisp rectangular edges: a saturated ultramarine-like blue panel at far left, a rich medium green panel second from left, a deep matte-looking black panel third from left, and a vivid bright red panel at far right. Subtle shadows fall beneath and slightly to the right of each canvas, suggesting they project a little from the wall.
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
A large, panoramic oil-on-canvas painting (about 6 × 13 ft) presents a geometric composition of two flat color planes. From the lower left, a cobalt-blue wedge extends far across the canvas, forming a long, low triangle with a sharp point at the far left edge and a straight base running along the bottom. The blue shape rises diagonally toward the upper right, where it meets a second shape: an off-white quadrilateral panel tilting upward and to the right. The off-white form overlaps the blue at their junction, creating an angled seam that cuts downward toward the lower right, where the two shapes terminate in a neat point. There is some subtle shadowing along the right-hand off-white form’s lower edge, while the rest of the painting remains smooth, matte, and sharply edged.
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
Visual Description
A painting about 11 feet wide presents two flat, joined canvases, each rotated like a diamond. A crisp diagonal seam joins the red shape, which occupies the upper-left portion, to the larger green shape, which fills the lower-right portion. Both color areas are matte and evenly painted. The overall form consists of two joined canvases turned roughly 45 degrees, their corners pointing toward the top, bottom, left, and right edges of the canvas. A faint, soft shadow along certain edges of the colored form gives slight depth.
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 paintingmeasuring about 7 feet tall and 6.5 feet wide is composed of four separate but joined rectangular canvas panelsof saturated warm color. At the very top runs a narrow band of intense red-orange, laid as a clean, flat panelacross the full width. Beneath it sits a similarly sized bright yellow panel, separated from the top panel by a crisp, straight seam. The central area is dominated by a broad, golden-orange rectangle panel. Below this, occupying the largest portion of the canvas, a deep, glowing yellow panelextends to the bottom edge. The divisions between panelsare mostly sharp and horizontal, though there are tiny irregularities and soft seams at the boundaries.