Floor 5: Ellsworth Kelly South: QR Code 504
Overview
Objects
6 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Label Text
1952–53
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
This work reflects not only Kelly’s early exploration of multi-panel paintings and color combinations, but also his interest in modular systems and the role of chance. He originally intended to leave it up to the future owner how many of the seven panels to exhibit, and in what order. After making the artwork, Kelly created a collage in which he catalogued some of the possible permutations of two, three, four, five, six, or seven panels. Ultimately, he decided that the original configuration was the most successful, and declared that the installation seen here would be the permanent one.
Visual Description
This multi-panel painting, around 13 feet wide and 3.5 feet tall, is organized into six evenly proportioned vertical rectangles arranged in a single row across a white wall. From left to right, the panels are a saturated medium blue, a vivid red, a white, a black, a bright yellow, and another repeat of the saturated medium blue; each panel sits within a thin white margin that acts like a frame. Narrow white vertical dividers separate the panels, and a slightly broader white border surrounds the entire composition.
Label Text
1950
Oil on wood
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
Shortly after he began to experiment with abstract compositions inspired by found forms, Kelly met the composer John Cage. Cage encouraged him to continue pulling ideas from the world around him, and showed Kelly a group of Japanese stencils he had purchased at a Paris market. Intrigued by the unusual shapes, Kelly went to find a set of his own. White Relief translates the positive and negative space of a stencil into a high relief (deeply sculpted surface). Its rows of elongated hexagons tap out a crisp rhythm of edges, highlights, and shadows. Kelly later dedicated White Relief to Cage.
Visual Description
A roughly 3 feet tall panel is painted entirely white and organized around sixteen small raised relief forms arranged in a precise 4-by-4 grid. Each relief piece is a flat polygon: a vertical rectangle whose lower and upper ends tapers to a centered point giving it a pentagonal silhouette. The forms are evenly spaced with consistent margins, creating four horizontal rows and four vertical columns across the surface. Subtle lighting produces pale gray shadows along the left edges and beneath the lower points of each shape, emphasizing their thickness and crisp beveled edges against the matte white ground. The panel’s perimeter is visible as a slightly darker, worn-looking border line, with faint smudges and tonal variations in the white paint.
Label Text
1949
Gesso, graphite, and oil on wood
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Mimi Haas Collection, and promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
Visual Description
A small painting showing a off-white rectangular band above a pale arch-like form.Near the center, is a large rounded yellow semicircle—like the top of a dome. The half dome form's****surface is scumbled and streaked, with visible brushy crosshatching and scraped texture that lets lighter underlayers show through. Below the yellow half-dome, a tall, pale off-white rectangular field occupies the lower middle of the panel, outlined by faint graphite or thin dark lines that define its edges. Surrounding this central rectangle and dome is a warm beige frame-like area, slightly darker than the interior whites, with gentle tonal variations and rubbed, worn-looking edges. Across the very top runs a wide, cool light-gray band, separated from the beige section by a fine horizontal line.
Label Text
1949
Gesso and oil on wood
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Mimi Haas Collection, and promised gift of Helen and Charles Schwab
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
Visual Description
A small painting about 2 feet tall presents a stark, centered black form on acream and off-white background. A single thick vertical black bar runs nearly the full height of the panel, stopping just short of the bottom edge. Three horizontal black bars intersect it: the topmost is the longest and sits close to the upper edge, spanning widely left and right; a shorter middle bar crosses at about the panel’s midpoint; and a third bar, similar in length to the middle one, crosses lower down. The black paint appears matte and opaque with slightly softened edges. The background is a warm, creamy white with visible fine cracking and scattered stains and discolorations—small ochre smudges and faint vertical marks—especially noticeable toward the lower half and along the margins.
Label Text
1951
Oil on linen
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
In the summer of 1950, while visiting friends at Villa La Combe on the Atlantic coast of France, Kelly became fascinated with the shadow of a handrail skipping choppily down a flight of stairs in bright sunlight. He photographed the stairs and sketched the broken shadows as they changed over the course of the day. Later, he transcribed these forms into a series of paintings in different colors, scales, and formats. Here, as in the other variations, Kelly has rendered the steps as though seen directly from above and rotated ninety degrees.
Visual Description
A vertically oriented painting around 5 feet tall presents a off-white background interrupted by crisp, saturated blue linear forms that resemble strips of tape. Across the top edge, a dense band of zigzagging, angular segments runs left to right, like a broken frieze of right angles. From near the upper right, a thick blue diagonal line drops steeply toward the lower right corner, functioning like a dominant “spine” that divides the composition and anchors the scattered marks. Around the center, shorter blue dashes and bent segments float independently, spaced like typographic strokes or fragments of a disassembled diagram. In the lower half, the blue marks thin out into isolated horizontal bars and small angled clusters, leaving large areas of open ground. The overall effect is a dynamic, deconstructed geometry: sharp edges, clean intersections, and varied line thicknesses creating movement from the crowded top down into a quieter, more open bottom.
Tactile Object Available
There is a physical touch object associated with this artwork.
View Tactile Object Details →Artwork Label Text
1951
Oil on linen
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