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Floor 5: Ellsworth Kelly South: Tactile Relief for La Combe III

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Wall 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.

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