Floor 5: Ellsworth Kelly North (exiting City Gallery)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Ellsworth Kelly North Gallery. This gallery contains some of Kelly's large, brightly-colored, single- and multi-panel pieces.
You've entered the square gallery in the back left corner, facing the front wall. There are four paintings along the walls, a freestanding form mounted to the floor near the right wall, and a touch object on a table on the front wall. This touch object has an additional QR code with a guided tactile description.
The exit to the Ellsworth Kelly South Gallery is at 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.
Note to visitors: If this is the beginning of your journey on the 5th Floor, you might be starting halfway through the exhibition. To find the start of the exhibition, turn around and walk to your left down to the end of the City Gallery. The 4th Floor Tactile Map is on the wall across from the elevators.
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
6 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1958
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
It takes a moment for the eye to register the slight irregularity of the black shape within the white rectangle of Wall. Depending on the angle from which the painting is viewed, its white border almost disappears, and the black suggests an askew window or door. The mysterious, restrained play of dark form against white painted background produces a subtly warped sense of space and introduces a tension between Wall and the gallery wall on which it hangs.
Visual Description
A rectangular oil-on-canvas painting similar in size to a large wall poster is dominated by an irregular black square that fills most of the surface. The dense, uniform black area is bordered by slim, slightly angled white margins on the left and right, while the bottom margin becomes a noticeably deeper white band. The black shape reads as matte and opaque and its left and right sides slant subtly toward the left, but at different degrees. They do not appear to be parallel to one another. The top of the black shape meets and forms the top edge of the canvas, apart from a small sliver of white on the far right.
Artwork Label Text
1974
Aluminum
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1994
This work is part of a group of vertical pieces in aluminum, wood, and stainless or weathering steel that Kelly began making in the mid-1970s. He frequently revisited a given form in varying colors, materials, and scales, exploring the radically different feeling that each version can bring to the same simple shape. The proportions of all the Curve sculptures are mathematically precise. The arcing outer edges of Curve IX are segments of a circle with a radius of 720 inches.
Visual Description
A tall, flat aluminum form—towering over the average adult at ten feet tall, but about as wide as their shoulders—stands upright as a matte light-gray slab with softly curving edges. Its silhouette subtly widens around the middle and narrows toward the top and bottom. The top edge appears nearly straight, echoing the bottom edge, which meets the gallery floor. At its base, the metal curves back at a sharp right angle; this support is bolted into the floor with two small circular bolts. The surface of the work is smooth and uniform, with faint tonal shifts from lighting. The sculpture casts a tall shadow on the white wall behind it.
Artwork Label Text
1963
Painted aluminum
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
Visual Description
A painted relief on aluminum—higher than a tall adult, and slightly narrower than their outstretched arms—features a vivid, cobalt-blue rectangular field with a single, irregularly shaped, matte-black form mounted over it and extending from its top edge to past its bottom edge. The blue panel reads as a crisp, flat plane with clean edges, filling most of the composition and establishing a saturated, uniform background.
Centered over the blue panel is a tall, narrow black element that runs vertically. It is connected to the blue element with five rows of rounded pegs, which extend about six inches from the blue panel. It has a gentle, sinuous curve that bows slightly as it descends, giving the rigid metal a ribbon-like presence. The black strip starts at the top edge of the blue panel, poking out slightly over the edge, and continues downward past the bottom edge, ending in a slanted, trapezoid-like tip that juts outward into the white wall area below. Subtle shadows along the black element's edges emphasize its three-dimensional separation from the blue surface.
Artwork Label Text
1962
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1996
Family Label: Ideas from the world
In Red White, Ellsworth Kelly uses just red and white to show the most important parts of something he saw in the real world.
Look closely. What does the shape remind you of?
Visual Description
This oil-on-canvas painting—higher than a tall adult but slightly narrower than their outstretched arms—shows a single large, irregular red shape on a white background. The abstract red form looks like a fan tilted to the side. The point of the fan is at our left, almost touching the left edge of the canvas, and the long, curved arc is on your right near the edge. The edges of this red form are uneven and slanted, with no straight sides. The red color is solid and flat, giving the shape a smooth presence.
Two elongated, tapered white openings cut through the red mass near the right half of the composition: one is higher and gently arcs up, while the other is lower and longer, arcing down. Both openings narrow to sharp points at the right edge of the red fan shape.
The white background remains empty and unmarked. The painting is presented 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 Red White by Ellsworth Kelly, an oil on canvas painting, showing a single large bright red shape set against a solid white background. The touch object is about one-tenth of the size of the original painting.
In this touch object, the raised area represents the red shape, and the recessed areas are white. First, explore the entire object with your whole hand, getting a sense of its overall shape. Then move to the top of the shape,where you’ll find a peaked point at 12' o clock. Tracing the edge clockwise, move right and down, noticing the subtle shifts in the curvature, until you reach a nick in the shape. On the other side of the nick, there is something to explore, more on that later. Keep exploring the outer edge of the shape clockwise. Moving down, you'll find a slightly larger nick, which you can also explore later. Continue down to the bottom until you find another peak at 6 o'clock, approximately opposite the peak where you started. Now feel the second half of the edge, moving up the left side. Here, the edge changes from a curve to a mostly straight edge. You'll reach the next peak at 9 o'clock and finish the exploration of the edge at the top, the pointed peak where we started.
Once you've explored the subtle shifts in the edge detail, go back to the first nick you found at around 2 o'clock. Explore the inside of this top crevice with one finger and notice the subtle shift in the form's edge. Then find the bottom crevice below and explore its details.
Try feeling the crevices at the same time, noticing the variations between the two, or go back to the edge with both hands, feeling the left and right sides simultaneously.
Artwork Label Text
1962
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1996
Artwork Label Text
2001
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2001
On an overcast day in New York, Kelly was struck by the sight of two red construction flags flapping together in the wind, and later translated that momentary perception into this artwork. Unlike many of Kelly's shaped paintings, Red on Red is composed of two standard square canvases. By combining and overlapping the panels, however, the artist created an irregular form that pushes into real space. A similar merging of painting and sculpture is evident in Black over Blue (1963), on the opposite wall.
Visual Description
A painted work—taller than a tall adult, but about as wide as their outstretched arms—presents two overlapping, nearly square panels painted in an orange-red. The upper panel sits slightly up and to the left, while the lower panel is positioned down and to the right, so their forms intersect in a broad, clean-edged overlap near the center.
The edges are sharply defined and the planes read as flat fields, yet the surface shows faint cloudy patches and barely perceptible brushwork—suggesting layered paint rather than a perfectly uniform fill. The strong, saturated red-orange dominates the composition, and the offset alignment creates a stepped silhouette with visible margins where the rear canvas extends beyond the front on the top and left, and where the front canvas projects beyond the rear on the right and bottom.