Floor 5: Ellsworth Kelly South (exiting Kelly West)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Ellsworth Kelly South Gallery. This gallery features a mix of Ellsworth Kelly's paintings and one relief.
You've entered the square gallery in the back right corner, facing the far front wall. There are six paintings along the walls and a touch object on a table near the back wall to your left. This touch object has an additional QR code with a guided tactile description. There is also a large quotation printed on the wall near the touch table.
The exit to the Ellsworth Kelly North Gallery is in the front left corner of the gallery. 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.
Label
"Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: There was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything; it all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panes, lines on a road map, the shape of a scarf on a woman's head. . .It was all the same: anything goes."
Objects
7 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork 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, oil-on-canvas painting, around three feet tall and 13 feet wide—similar in size to a panoramic band of windows across a wall—is comprised of seven identically sized vertical rectangular canvases joined together in a single row and hung directly on the white gallery wall without a frame. Starting on your left, the panels are saturated medium blue, vivid red, white, black, bright yellow, the same white, and the same saturated medium blue. The blue, red, black, and yellow panels are surrounded by a thin white border that acts like a frame—spacing the adjacent colors apart from one another. In the case of the white canvases, there is no visible line or margin, but it is implied. The paint is flat and uniform, with no visible brushstrokes, texture, or modulation.
Artwork Label Text
1953
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
Family Label: Color Detective
Ellsworth Kelly enjoyed using color in ways that could trick the eye. He mixed and matched colors to notice how they seemed different when they touched.
Look closely at the yellows on each side of this painting. Do they look the same to you?
Visual Description
An oil-on-canvas painting similar in height to a short adult and about as wide as their outstretched arms is filled edge-to-edge with fourteen narrow vertical bands of saturated color arranged in a smooth, rainbow-like progression.
The stripes are straight, parallel, and of identical width, creating a geometric rhythm across the surface. Starting at our left is a pale, lemony yellow band, followed by yellow-green and several increasingly deeper greens. The sequence moves into cooler hues with teal and blue-green, then a medium sky-to-denim blue, and then deeper blue shifting toward violet. Near the center, multiple purple bands appear, ranging from bluish violet to a muted plum. Moving from the center of the canvas to our right, the palette then warms through magenta and rose-red into stronger reds and red-orange, continuing into bright orange and golden orange. At our far right, the colors end in a yellow band, so that the yellow bookends the spectrum. The paint is applied relatively flatly and uniformly, without visible brushstrokes, but the hand-painted quality of the work is visible in the imperfect edges between the color bands.
Artwork 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 vertically oriented panel about the size of an average wall poster is painted entirely white and contains sixteen small, raised flat polygons arranged in a precise four-by-four grid. In the top row only, the four shapes are five-sided figures with flat tops and pointed bottoms, creating pentagonal silhouettes that point downward. The shapes in the other three rows are six-sided and come to points at the top and bottom, so they resemble slightly elongated hexagons.
The forms are evenly spaced with consistent margins, creating four horizontal rows and four vertical columns across the surface. Subtle lighting produces pale shadows 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. The panel sits in a white frame.
Artwork 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, vertically oriented, gesso-and-oil painting on a wood panel—about the size of a small wall poster—contains a central, vertical, off-white rectangle that starts at the bottom of the panel and is capped by a rounded yellow form that resembles an oblong semicircle. These two shapes are both outlined in hand-drawn graphite lines. Another graphite line crosses the full panel at the topmost edge of the semicircle, bisecting the composition. Above this line is a narrow horizontal band that is the same off-white color as the rectangle below.
Below the line, on either side of the semicircle and rectangle, is a warm beige area. Though the texture of the paint is relatively smooth, the grain of the wooden panel beneath is visible. The semicircle’s surface is streaked with visible brushy crosshatching and scraped texture that is off-white in color. This painting sits in a white frame.
Artwork 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 vertically oriented painting about the size of a small wall poster presents a stark, centered black form—a thick black vertical line intersected by three black horizontal lines—on an 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. This painting sits centered in a white frame.
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
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, oil-on-linen painting—roughly as high as a short adult but narrower than their outstretched arms—presents an irregular pattern of crisp, saturated blue linear forms against solid white ground. Across the top edge, a dense band of these zigzagging, angular segments runs from our left to right, like a broken frieze of right angles. On our right, from an area near the top corner of the piece, a blue diagonal line drops steeply toward the lower right corner, partly dividing the composition and anchoring some of the scattered marks.
Around the center, shorter blue dashes and bent segments float independently. Some are arranged horizontally, while others are positioned diagonally or connect in V shapes. In the lower half, the blue marks thin out into isolated horizontal bars and small angled clusters, leaving large areas of open ground. The painting sits in a white frame.
Touch Object Available
There is a physical touch object associated with this artwork.
Skip to Touch ObjectGuided Tactile Description
This is a touch object representing La Combe III by Ellsworth Kelly, an oil painting of saturated blue linear shapes that resemble strips of tape on an off-white background. The touch object is about one-quarter the size of the original artwork. In this touch object, the raised area represents the blue shapes, and the recessed areas are off-white.
Start by exploring the entire object with your whole hand, sweeping it across the surface to get a sense of the overall composition. Then, starting at the top, use your fingertips to follow the dense arrangement of shapes. Notice how their angles and edges shift as they become sparser toward the bottom of the piece. On the right side, find the long line that stretches from near the top to the lower right corner.
Notice how some of the shapes vary slightly in thickness but are of similar lengths. Can you find any shapes that are the same?
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
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.