Things to Cover Walls

The Smithsonian Institution

"Things to Cover Walls": Ellsworth Kelly's Paris Paintings and the Tradition of MuralDecorationAuthor(s): Michael PlanteSource: American Art, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 36-53Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109194 .Accessed: 05/02/2015 16:40

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"Things to Cover Walls" Ellsworth Kelly's Paris Paintings and the Tradition ofMural Decoration

Michael Plante I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long-to hang on the walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures-they should be the wall.

-Ellsworth Kelly to John Cage, 4 September 1950

Ellsworth Kelly at the Pont des Arts, 1949

Until recently, American museums have concealed Ellsworth Kelly's interest in creating multiple-panel paintings that are responsive to their interior setting by presenting them in cramped installations that downplay their interaction with the architecture of the room. Yet their decorative qualities are exactly what distinguish Kelly's works from those of his American peers, particularly the minimalists, with whom he is too often associated. Kelly's work relates more directly to the tradition of mural painting that developed in France after World War II and that revitalized the nineteenth- century tradition of decorative painting. In fact, Kelly's work in general has been misread by American critics, who for too long have overlooked the importance of his Paris years.'

Through his exhibitions in the late 1950s at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, a resolutely abstract expres- sionist milieu, Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923) is routinely cited as having announced the end of gestural abstraction-the so-called Tenth Street Touch-in New York. In

accounts of American art of this period, he and Jack Youngerman are invariably categorized as "bridges" spanning the divide between abstract expressionism and the minimalism and color-field painting of the 1960s. But the particulars of Kelly's art have always been difficult to set in an American framework, perhaps because Kelly's art was not reactive to abstract expressionism and because American critics had ceased looking to Europe for aesthetic ideas. Developed in France and presented to New York audiences as a fait accompli, Kelly's works proved unnerving or at least puzzling. But they had been well received in Paris, where from 1948 to 1954 Kelly had absorbed many of the formal and intellectual issues that engaged the city's geometric abstract artists during the immediate postwar years. More important, he had developed his pictorial strategies at a time when French artists were once again exploring issues involving the execution and installation of mural paintings.

Paris in the late 1940s was key for Kelly, not only in terms of his artistic development but also for the connections

37 American Art


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he began to make with dealers and critics. In late 1949 he met Michel Seuphor- artist, critic, and historian of the De Stijl movement, which espoused revolutionary and self-conscious art-who became an avid supporter. Over the next few years, Kelly's work was exhibited at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris and in the two annual "Tendance" shows at the Galerie Maeght. The Galerie Maeght's stable of artists included the most prestigious names in contemporary art-Pablo Picasso and

Kelly's work in general has been misread by American critics, who for too long have overlooked the importance of his Paris years.

Henri Matisse. In the early 1950s it organized a series of group exhibitions that presented the work of young artists to the Paris public. Jack Youngerman, one of Kelly's few American associates, exhibited a painting in the Galerie Maeght's show "Les mains eblouies" in October 1950. The following year Kelly's reputation began to climb when four of his paintings were placed in the "Tendance" exhibition. That two young, relatively inexperienced American artists could have received this kind of attention in Paris indicates the openness of the community, especially to those practicing abstraction, and the extent to which dealers and critics were casting about for new talent. The success that Kelly, in particular, achieved depended on his work being read within the context of French contemporary art. Given the growing awareness in Paris of the achievements of the New York school during this period, it is remarkable that

critics ignored Kelly's nationality, allowing his work to slip easily into the discourse of European art.

Of the American artists who lived in Paris after World War II, those working in a geometric abstract style-what Georges Duthuit termed abstraitfroid- were the most successful in securing exhibition venues and critical attention. Geometric abstraction maintained a more enduring stylistic viability in Paris than it did in New York and represented an entirely different set of issues. The deaths of Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Robert Delaunay paradoxically had the effect of propelling the movement forward in France by providing historical masters to be either emulated or rejected by a younger generation. What had appeared as an esoteric aesthetic position during the 1930s and early 1940s suddenly spread throughout Paris.

One factor of Kelly's work that distanced it from contemporary American abstraction and the sort of prewar geometric abstraction produced by Mondrian was its engagement with mural painting. Kelly's development of the multiple-panel painting, a format he continues to explore, was inspired by the renewed discourse surrounding the mural format that circulated throughout the Paris art circles of the day.

Murals and Politics

The postwar revival of the mural was born of two separate impulses-the populist concerns of the French Communist Party for a renewed public art, and the practical need to repair and reconstruct buildings, mostly outside of Paris, that had been destroyed or damaged during the war. In 1950 Jean Cassou, director of the Musde National d'Art Moderne, described the interest in public art and the forced

38 Spring 1995


repatriation of "exiled" modernists from the retreat of individualism:

After a period of exasperating individualism, there should be a period of working toward some collective action no longer compartmentalized, but rather harmonious and reconciled. The wall, the first element of the house and therefore a sign of the human community, can help with such a development. It forces the painter, like the architect, to move beyond what is closed and schematic and to move toward what is the essential in their art. ... In this way, the painter is reinstated into the life ofsociety.2

The postwar conception of the mural was rooted in the ideas expressed at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris, where the mural had been omnipresent and the question of how the modernist might address the mural most pressing. Throughout the early 1950s ideas about public art continued to surface throughout the world of art and design. It was during this period, for example, that Jean Lurqat began an ambitious program to produce tapestries at the Atelier d'Aubusson.

The Marxist concern with the mural can be traced back to 1931 and the foundation of RAPKh, the Russian Association of Proletarian Artists, which called upon artists to renounce both modernism in general and easel painting in particular as tools of capitalism. Members of the French avant-garde had occasion to meet Soviet artists and intellectuals throughout the 1930s, though few actually joined the Commu- nist Party. Interest in Soviet social realism continued after the war, though progres- sive Communist defenders of the mural tradition, such as Fernand Lager, saw abstraction as a vital component of a renewed mural practice. In 1951, when Lager formulated his requirements for a truly modern painting, the necessity of

mural projects was among them. Accord- ing to Leger, modern art must aspire toward "an abstract art which must adapt itself to the wall. A monumental art, ready for walls."3

Although the Soviet Union provided much of the ideological push behind the practice of mural painting in France at the beginning of the 1930s, the United

Kelly's development of the multiple-panelpainting ... was inspired by the renewed discourse surrounding the mural format that circulated throughout the Paris art circles of the day.

States provided a model for the French later in the decade, largely through the dissemination of aesthetic ideas emerging from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Liger was perhaps the figure most responsible for translating American mural ideas to the French public. He made several visits to the United States beginning in 1931, and America's attraction for him seemed to rest on the promise of future mural commissions.

On Lager's first visit to the United States, he became acquainted with the murals of Jose Clemente Orozco and Thomas Hart Benton at the New School for Social Research in New York. He was involved in two separate projects with the New York City mural division of the Federal Art Project in 1936, including one-a collaboration with younger American artists such as Byron Browne and Willem de Kooning that was never realized-to decorate the pier of the French Line shipping company at the harbor.4 The Federal Art Project provided

39 American Art


Lager with significant contacts with young, socially engaged artists.

Lager spent the war years in the United States, and he returned to France as committed to mural painting as ever. Postwar Europe was seeing its first examples of American and Mexican mural painting and the kind of socially committed art, by Ben Shahn and others,

"The role ofpainting I think, the role of all decorative painting, is to enlarge surfaces, to work so that one no longer feels the dimensions of the wall. "

- Henri Matisse

that was the legacy of the WPA. In 1952, the Musde National d'Art Moderne in Paris presented an exhibition of Mexican art that included works by that country's muralists. The following year, the museum mounted an exhibition of contemporary American painting entitled "12 peintres et sculpteurs americains contemporains," including the work of Shahn. Shahn's work was also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954, where he shared the American pavilion with Willem de Kooning. In short, during the years following World War II, Europeans were clearly aware of American and American-based mural painting, which figured prominently in the European revival of mural decorations.

Mondrian, Matisse, and Murals

In France, support for mural painting was not necessarily tied to any partisan

or nationalistic agendas. In 1935 the Association l'Art Mural published its first manifesto arguing for a depoliticized approach to the mural, and it organized salons in 1935, 1936, and 1938. Its first postwar salon took place in the summer of 1949 at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. The salon's catalogue lists some peculiar choices categorized as mural painting. Along with classic 1930s mural paintings by Andre Lhote, Le Corbusier, Leger, and Delaunay were such curious selections as Mondrian's Composition (1914, Stedeljk Museum, Amsterdam). The organizers of the salon apologized for the inclusion of art that was not necessarily conceived in the mural format but decried the paucity of examples of public art from which to choose. In an article published in Art d'aujourd'hui, the association evaded the issue of whether abstraction or figuration was appropriate for mural painting: "You will ask what the subject of mural art has become. I reply that we do not at all mean to fight for one aesthetic position at the expense of others. Each artist will defend his point of view, which history will accept or refuse." Paradoxically, in the same publication earlier that summer, Michel Seuphor had conjured one of the most illuminating visions of murals to date. Along with his description and photographs of the unveiling of the Le Corbusier mural in the Swiss Pavilion of the Cite Universitaire, he included a 1930s photograph of Mondrian's studio in Paris, showing a grid of colored squares tacked to the wall.5 With this photograph, Seuphor provided the least politicized definition of the mural enterprise, dismissing issues of politics, social realism, and abstraction in favor of the simple decoration of a wall.

This simplified definition of the mural aesthetic was most forcefully argued in the early 1950s by Henri Matisse, whose

40 Spring 1995


T., 371' #:P Mst ?? R -1, 0,

W,; j??:g Henri Matisse, The Thousand and One Nights, 1950. Gouache on cut-and-pasted paper, 139.1 x 374 cm (54 ? x 147 1/4 in.). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Acquired through the generosity of the Sarah Mellon Scaife family

series of decorative cutouts made an impact on young American artists like Ellsworth Kelly. Beginning in 1950 until his death in 1954, Matisse explored gouaches ddcoupees in compositions that grew increasingly large and more self- conscious in their placement on the wall. Matisse commented in 1951, "The role of painting I think, the role of all decorative painting, is to enlarge surfaces, to work so that one no longer feels the dimensions of the wall."6 Working from a chair with the help of assistants, he was able to organize large numbers of small cut-paper units into mural-size compositions, such as The Thousand and One Nights (fig. 1), by directing their placement on the walls of his bedroom. Created in this way-composed on the walls of his bedroom and studio in Nice-Matisse executed a decorative project on the wall that responded to architectural needs and was bounded by architectural limitations. If anything, the removal of the cutouts from his walls and their placement onto flat panels contra- dicted the spirit with which the works were originally created.7

Matisse had executed mural commissions at various times throughout his

career, including projects for Sergei Shchukin in the Soviet Union and Albert Barnes in Merion, Pennsylvania. These pale in comparison, however, with his project to decorate the Chapel of the Rosary of the Dominicans at Vence, in the south of France. For this project, which occupied him from 1948 to 1952, Matisse designed not only the stained- glass windows and ceramic tile murals but the chasubles as well. Clearly, by the end of his life, Matisse had committed himself to the creation of murals and architectural environments. He wrote to Louis Aragon in 1943, "Perhaps after all I have an unconscious belief in a future life ... some paradise where I shall paint frescoes."8

Between 1944 and 1950 Matisse exhibited the large cutouts in Paris. He began to send major decorative cutout panels to the annual Salon de mai and showed three major cutouts, as well as two of the chapel maquettes, at the Maison de la Pensde Franqaise in 1950. Among the three panels was his Thousand and One Nights. More than 12 1/2 feet long, it was the first large-scale piece Matisse executed that was not to be part of the Vence Chapel. The Thousand and

41 American Art


2 Paintingfor a White Wall, 1952. Oil on canvas, five joined panels, 59.7 x 181 cm (23 '/2x 71 '/4 in.). Collection of the artist

One Nights was also shown in an exhibition entitled "Sur quatre murs" at the Galerie Maeght in 1951, the year of Kelly's first "Tendance" exhibition at the same gallery.

Kelly, Collage, and Construction

The production and exhibition of Matisse's large-scale cutout compositions coincided with Kelly's most productive period in France. Kelly moved to the village of Sanary in November 1951, and the most dramatic change in his work was a new attitude toward color, often attributed by critics to the famous light and color of the south of France.9 Certainly, the bright light of the Riviera, as well as the colorful boats and brightly painted houses, must have awakened Kelly's color sense. But Kelly was probably equally influenced by the increasing body of Matisse cutouts that were on view in Paris. That the cutouts might also have been inspired by the colors of the south of France, where they were created, would have only enhanced their appeal for Kelly.

Kelly first tackled a multiple-panel painting during the winter of 1952 in Sanary. Painting for a White Wall (fig. 2) continued the experiments with modular

paintings he had begun the previous year with works like Cite'.10 At this point, Kelly realized that the multiple-panel works could become sufficiently objectlike to elude traditional associations with easel painting yet still bear intense runs of chromatic color. An examination of the collage Study for "Paintingfor a White Wall" (fig. 3) reveals that the composition originally had only four panels, essentially the four left panels of the final painting. Although the color has none of the crispness found in the completed work, its conception was fairly well-developed at this point. Kelly recalls that the unusual pairing of two close hues- pink and orange-came from a chance arrangement of collage papers on the floor of his studio. Kelly regularly used construction paper to make his collages and then matched the colors for the final multiple-panel paintings. Observing that the colors found in Kelly's paintings are the same as those of the construction papers used by French schoolchildren, Yve-Alain Bois has suggested that they are "ready-made" colors-that is, derived from the colors of the commercially produced paper Kelly used in his collages."

When Kelly constructed Painting for a White Wall from the collage study, he added a blue panel to the composition's

42 Spring 1995


3 Study for "Paintingfor a White Wall," 1952. Collage, 24.1 x 55.9 cm (23 1/2 x 71 1/2 in.). Collection of the artist

right side, calling it "a revelation that five differently colored panels could exist as a painting." By adding the blue panel, Kelly enclosed the white panel and forced it to function in an emphatic way. While the collage's white panel is spatially ambigu- ous in relation to the wall, the painting's white panel occupies a strategic position, oscillating between its status as a panel (or an object) and its visual and psychological equivalence with the wall. Trevor Fairbrother has identified an important shift in the traditional relationship between form and ground in Kelly's work from this period: the painting-object (so-called to distinguish these multiple-panel constructions from conventional easel paintings) became the form, while the wall itself assumed the characteristics of the ground.12 Scale and installation requirements notwithstanding (the work measures 23 /2 x 71 /4 inches), Kelly's Painting for a White Wall is essentially a mural statement. Yet as a mural, it is attached to the wall, not part of it.

During this same period, Kelly pursued an interest in architecture that dated from his earliest time in France, when he had explored eleventh-century Ro- manesque structures. In 1952 he traveled to Marseilles to see Le Corbusier's apartment building, Unite d'Habitation, still under construction. The walls

between the balconies on the building's exterior were painted bright pastel colors, a use of color in modern architecture that Kelly had not seen before. Kelly's fascina- tion with this building, as well as the architect's Swiss Pavilion at the Cite Universitaire in Paris, prompted him to bring some of his collages to Marcel Breuer, who was designing the UNESCO building in Paris, in hopes of securing a mural commission. Breuer, however, was not interested.13

But Kelly was undaunted in his preoccupation with the mural. In a letter to Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Kelly outlined his ideas about mural painting:

I have decided against the policy ofexhibit- ing. . . . And I don't believe in selling pictures. That's all a hangover from the Renaissance. The future artist must work directly with society. I believe that the days of the "easel"painting are fading, and that the future art will be something more than just "personality paintings "for walls of apartments and museums. The future art must go to the wall itself And this is what I have been trying to do in my work.'4

Dated 29 November, probably 1952, the letter may have been written after

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4 Red Yellow Blue White (formerly Bon Marche), 1952. Twenty-five dyed-cotton panels in five parts, each 30.5 x 30.5 cm (12 x 12 in.); 152.4 x 375.9 cm (60 x 148 in.) overall, including 55.9 cm (22 in.) spaces between sections. Collection of the artist

5 Colors for a Large Wall, 1951. Oil on canvas, mounted on sixty-four wooden panels, 239.3 x 239.9 cm (94 1/4 x 94 /4 in.). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of the artist

Kelly's second exhibition at the annual "Tendance" at the Galerie Maeght, for he did not show again in Paris until 1958. By that time he had established his reputation in New York.

Kelly's most aggressive rejection of the easel painting tradition was expressed in Red Yellow Blue White (fig. 4). The painting comprises five separate vertical panels hung twenty-two inches apart (as specified on the back of the canvas) to create an overall image. Each of the panels consists of two blue squares and one square each of red, yellow, and white. The colors are stacked in three variations, but the two outside units and two inside units are identical, producing a bilateral symmetry. Nowhere in Red Yellow Blue White are the colors in the sequence of the title, nor are the panels painted; instead, Kelly stretched commer- cial dyed fabric over stretcher bars. In this important sense, the painting was "fabricated" rather than painted; in its use of pre-dyed materials it also relates to Matisse's cutouts. In no other painting does Kelly make such a strategic use of the wall as ground, allowing the vertical panels to be read as form. The painting dictates a healthy stretch of white wall,

corresponding to the white panels that ascend and then descend on the vertical units.

Unlike the Americans who would review these works later in the decade, French and German critics understood Kelly in the context of his engagement with the wall. Seuphor was among those who observed the mural qualities of Kelly's paintings, including Colors for a Large Wall (fig. 5), shown in the 1952 "Tendance" exhibition. In this work, Kelly grappled with many of the plastic problems of the grid inherited from Mondrian and the constructivist tradition but solved many of the formal problems by simply enlarging the grid to mural proportions and grafting it onto the "wall" of the title. From a collage study using randomly placed colored papers, Kelly faithfully transcribed the colors onto the work's sixty-four modules, each one foot square, thus allowing the color to become more effective and substantial and the panels to develop their own visual properties. The hues were predominantly chosen from the pool of secondary colors, perhaps as a small rebellion against Mondrian's use of primary colors. The random nature of

44 Spring 1995


Kelly's color placement in Colors for a Large Wall sets the painting in contrast to Mondrian's neoplastic work from the 1930s; in fact, the picture may be thought of as "anti-Mondrian" in character. 15

Seuphor's essay accompanying the 1952 "Tendance" exhibition reveals his endless surprise at the growth of the abstraction movement after World War II and the innovation displayed by younger painters. He briefly reviewed the history

45 American Art


of abstract art as it developed from Kandinsky and Mondrian, then discussed the five artists in the exhibition, saving Kelly for last:

Finally, we come to the American Kelly. He is a rhythmist ofsurfaces whose style is one ofpeaceful assurance and real distinction. His virtuosity is brilliant through its very sobriety of means. Here again ... one sees that the patient lesson ofMondrian has borne its fruits. Fruits which, ofcourse, have their own particular flavor. Kelly's art is light and transparent like the morning air on a hilltop. I would like to see him decorate huge airports bathed in light. There, his simple formats, so harmonious, would be like clear, sweet music helping the spirit to fly toward the high plateaus ofan imagined pefection where ALL WOULD BE REST.'

Kelly probably smarted from Seuphor's reference to Mondrian, but this was also the most responsive criticism Kelly had received to date. Wanting to see Kelly's art decorating "huge airports," the ultimate symbol of the modern age in Europe and America, Seuphor clearly read Kelly's cues and understood Colors for a Large Wall's mural aspiration, both in its title (which was given in English) and its scale.

Models and Modules

Ultimately, it is the absence of Matisse from Seuphor's essay that is most acutely felt when looking at Kelly's work in the "Tendance" exhibition. Matisse's late cutouts made possible the marriage of geometry to dazzling, evocative color found in Kelly's multiple-panel works, hothouse hybrids of color and form. Though Kelly has denied any significant influence from Matisse, there is sufficient

empirical and documentary evidence to argue that Kelly was inspired by Matisse's belief in the potential of color as a decorative and spatial element.17

"I would like to see him decorate huge airports bathed in light. There, his simple formats, so harmonious, would be like clear, sweet music helping the spirit to fly. "

-Michael Seuphor

During this period, Matisse functioned as a model problem-solver who had found a way around many of the impasses that had stymied European abstraction after the war. Just as Matisse composed the large decorative cutouts from individual "modules" that could function separately or interact within the larger compositions, Kelly discovered he could expand or contract the scale of his multiple-panel works once the module was set. More- over, in the cutouts Matisse was able to distinguish between the concepts of "color" and "paint" (in French, both couleur), separating color from the paint and brushwork that he believed controlled the spatial qualities of a painting. For this reason, he used gouache to color his papers becaue of its ability to produce an even saturation.18 This separation of color from the medium of paint is likewise a subtext in Kelly's paintings from the period, particularly in works like Red Yellow Blue White, in which he used pre- dyed fabrics.

That Kelly adopted Matisse's plastic strategies is supported by the number of

46 Spring 1995


collages he executed during that winter in Sanary-and has continued to the present. The Sanary collages are not studies but fully formed color compositions that are works of art in their own right, regardless of whether Kelly chose to eventually translate them into paintings. To the degree that Matisse's cutouts should not be regarded as "collages" in the traditional sense (and Jack Cowart has argued precisely this), Kelly's collages, with their formal sophistication and finished look, likewise bear little relation to our historical understanding of this medium.19

In her catalogue of Kelly's works on paper, Diane Upright has distanced Kelly's collages from his multiple-panel paintings, claiming there is only "resem- blance, and nothing on par with scale, color, nor surface."20 But precisely the opposite argument can be made: the collages that Kelly produced between 1952 and 1954 are absolutely contiguous with his paintings and as formally similar to them as works executed in different media can possibly be. Compare Tiger (fig. 6) with the collaged Studyfor "Tiger" (fig. 7). The painting consists of five joined panels that reproduce the "ready- made" freshness of the collage's juxtaposi- tions of prefabricated magenta, orange, yellow, blue, and white construction papers. One sees in Tiger, as well, the subtle manipulation of the grid that developed as Kelly explored the multiple- panel construction. In both compositions, Kelly veered away from symmetry, allowing the strength of the colors to determine how the work would feel. Though the artist slightly adjusted the hues and tones in the painted version of Tiger, the overall composition, the relative sizes of the modules, and the proportion of each module in relation to the painting as a whole remains the same. Clearly, Kelly resolved all formal problems at the collage stage, translating the substance of

his structural and coloristic ideas directly to the painting the following year.

Indeed, the degree of formal resolution found in all of Kelly's collages and the remarkable equivalencies between these paper works and his multiple-panel paintings argue for their use as prototypes,

"I believe that the days of the 'easel'painting are fading, and that the future art will be something more than just personality paintings'for walls of apartments and museums. The future art must go to the wall itself."

-Ellsworth Kelly

even maquettes in the architectural sense. Kelly produced the collages as finished concepts that could be reproduced exactly-whether enlarged to function as easel-size pictures or to meet the demands of larger architectural commissions. According to Kelly, the collages could be enlarged to any size, for he had already worked through all potential design and compositional problems attendant with translating them to a larger scale. Once his design was fixed and the unit of module calibrated, he could expand or contract his composition at will. Colors for a Large Wall, for example, with its sixty-four panels each one foot square, could be doubled in scale or halved and retain its same pictorial cohesiveness. Kelly claims he would have made his paintings larger in the 1950s if he had had the means and resources to do so. By submitting his collages to both

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6 Tiger, 1953. Oil on canvas (five joined panels), 205.1 x 217.2 cm (80 3/4 x 85 /2 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift (partial and promised) of the artist

Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier in hopes of winning mural commissions, he sought to fulfill this vision. In a letter to John Cage in 1950, Kelly wrote, "My collages are only ideas for things much larger- things to cover walls."21

The collages allowed Kelly to fix a composition for later fabrication. This sometimes occurred several years after the collage was made, when Kelly could devote himself completely to the paintings. But because the collages'

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7 Study for "Tiger," 1952. Collage, 81.9 x 87 cm (32 /4x 34 /4 in.). Collection of the artist

conceptions were so highly resolved, such broad time lapses posed no problem as to the paintings' formal resolution. Several of the collages that Kelly made in Paris were not translated into paintings until he returned to New York. The collage Study for "White Plaque, Bridge Arch and Reflection "was made in Paris in 1951; the final construction of oil on wood was finished in New York during the winter of 1955. Gaza, a four-panel construction, was executed in New York in 1956 from a study done in Paris in 1952. And finally, in 1987, Kelly created Blue Yellow Red, a painting consisting of three joined panels, from a Paris collage of 1954.

The production of "prototypes" for the later execution of murals and other noneasel works of art had strong support in the Paris art world of the early 1950s. The idea was promoted not only by mural painters but also by avant-garde artists such as Victor Vasarely. From the time of his first Paris exhibition at the newly opened Galerie Denise Rend in 1944, Vasarely was reproached for not producing "real" paintings. He replied that his productions-units that could be infi- nitely repeated-were conceived of as the "opposite" of easel paintings. Though Vasarely's objectives were not based in ideas keyed to either mural painting or decorative painting, his desire to challenge

49 American Art


the dominance of easel painting in contemporary art ran parallel to these movements.22

Vasarely had been influenced by Bauhaus ideas at an early age, much as Kelly would be years later. Vasarely's point of departure was the idea that the easel painting, regardless of how bold in conception, could not remain within the confines of galleries and collectors'

"The monochrome buildings demand color, and the spaces demand an image on a large scale-powerful statements which are very much alive."

-Ellsworth Kelly

apartments-an opinion not unlike the disdain Kelly expressed for the gallery system in his letter to Hilla Rebay. Vasarely's solution to the problem of the easel picture was to create a series of "start-up prototypes" that could be enlarged and multiplied. Vasarely conceived of his prototype system as providing a new beginning, a new potential for art. Although he had Marxist concerns that Kelly did not share, both were motivated by the same desire to explore alternatives to the easel picture. Vasarely wrote in the "Yellow Manifesto" of 1955, "If the notion of plastic work has thus far been seen as a process of handicraft, and if it has been locked within the 'single entity' myth, this is no longer so. It has come to imply re-creation, multiplication, and expansion."23 Vasarely's process involved using graph paper to produce careful prototypes of his compositions, which were then translated into larger

formats by studio assistants. Kelly did not rebel from the "handicraft" quality of his objects, though certainly there have been occasions when he employed assistants with certain pieces. Kelly's signature painting style has been dependent upon an even, uninflected facture that implies (paradoxically, given the tremendous attention to surface construction) the absence of the artist's hand. His collage prototypes were thus encoded so that the final work could be fabricated, as needed, by assistants, much as the muralists of the 1930s conceived works that were actually executed by assistants.

A Bridge from Paris

Kelly returned to New York in July 1954. His first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery consisted of his Paris paintings, which were probably priced too steeply for an artist relatively unknown in America. Few of the works sold. But in 1956 Kelly finally received an architectural commission for the Transportation Building in Philadelphia's Penn Center. For this he designed a lobby sculpture (fig. 8), consisting of 104 aluminum panels distributed over a ten-by-seventy- foot frieze, that epitomized his experiments in separating form from ground.24 This was the only major architectural commission Kelly would receive for several years, though he continued to pursue mural commissions, which, he believed, would provide the institutional and financial support he needed.

In an undated "statement," probably mimeographed and placed in the galleries during his 1957 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Kelly expounded on the relationship between painting and architecture:

For a long time painting and architecture have remained separated. Today there is very little collaboration ofthe plastic arts

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8 Lobby sculpture, 1956-57. Anodized '/8 in. aluminum, 104 panels, 365.8 x 1950.7 x 30.5 cm (144 x 768 x 12 in.) overall. Transportation Building, Penn Center, Philadelphia

with architecture producing anything of real value. Perhaps the reason for this is that most contemporary painting is too personal for large wall spaces and the easel painting artist is more involved in his painting as an end in itself rather than relating it to building. However, there is an awakening among some artists to the demands made upon them by the new architecture. ... The

monochrome buildings demand color, and the spaces demand an image on a large scale-powerful statements which are very much alive.25

These ideas, developed in Paris and expressed five years earlier in his letter to Rebay, must have fallen flat on the New York art community in the late 1950s.

51 American Art


With the end of the WPA, the mural aesthetic in the United States had re- ceded. New York would not experience the decorative murals of Matisse's last years until 1961, when Monroe Wheeler organized "The Last Works of Henri Matisse: Large Cut Gouaches" for the Museum of Modern Art.

But then, the direction of painting in New York was changing. Jack Youngerman, who also exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery, said: "It is just that you think of one group of painters being a part of a common moment, like say the whole Pollock-Rothko thing with Betty. And then you think of other painters as being of another moment. But actually there is always an overlapping."26 The

Paris expatriates who returned to New York constituted that "overlap" generation-Al Held, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Youngerman himself, and Kelly. This second generation of the New York school developed the direction abstract expressionism would take into formalist abstraction. But for Kelly, the formal concerns developed in Paris would continue to occupy his art production throughout his career. Described by American critics as a bridge between abstract expressionism and minimalism and color-field painting, Kelly is more accurately understood as a principal importer of the postwar art enterprise of Paris to the high art circles of New York.

52 Spring 1995


Notes

Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992), the catalogue of an exhibition at the Galerie National du Jeu de Paume in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washing- ton, D.C., has demonstrated the continued influence of Paris on the postwar American avant-garde. The letter in the epigraph is quoted on pp. 187-88.

Trevor Fairbrother, Ellsworth Kelly: Seven Paintings (1952-55/1987) (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1987), unpaginated, has argued persuasively for a reading of Kelly's work that incorpo- rates aspects of mural painting, though he does not locate the formative aspects of Kelly's style in the Paris milieu of the postwar years.

It is only fair to state that Ellsworth Kelly objects to the term decorative and specifies that his paintings and wall sculptures are "objects" hung on the wall. According to Kelly, "the content of the work is form and color; with the separation of form and ground, the result is the wall becomes the ground." Kelly to author, 9 February 1995.

2 Jean Cassou, Situation de l'art moderne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1950), pp. 140-41.

3 Fernand Lager, quoted in Germain Viatte, "Masters of the Older Generation," in Aftermath: France 1945-54, New Images ofMan (London: Barbican Centre for Arts and Conferences, 1982), p. 36.

4 See Simon Willmoth, "Lager and America," in Fernand Liger: The Later Years, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1987), pp. 45-46.

5 Saint-Maur, "Pourquoi l'art mural?" Art d'aujourd'hui 2 (July/August 1949): 2; and Michel Seuphor, "Le mur," Art d'aujourd'hui 2 (June 1949): unpaginated.

6 Henri Matisse to Georges Charbonnier (1951), quoted in John Hallmark Neff, "Matisse, His Cutouts and the Ultimate Method," in Henri Matisse: Paper Cutouts, ed. Jack Cowart (St. Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts, 1977), p. 35.

7 Photographs taken of Matisse's studio and bedroom with the cutouts in situ are revealing. Compositions often wrapped around the corners of the room to fill two walls, rather than one flat surface. The female figure in La Niegresse (1952-53, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) was originally installed so that her strange, triangular feet were resting on the surface of the studio floor while the rest of her figure was tacked to the wall. In this sense, Matisse explored the full decorative potential of architectural space.

8 Henri Matisse to Louis Aragon (1943), quoted in Jack Flam, Matisse on Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), p. 95.

9 See E. C. Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 40.

10 Unless otherwise noted, all works by Ellsworth Kelly remain in the artist's collection.

11 See Fairbrother; and Yve-Alain Bois, "Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti- Composition in Its Many Guises," in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, p. 10.

12 Ellsworth Kelly, interview with Trevor Fairbrother, 18 August 1987; and Ellsworth Kelly, "Statement," 1983, artist's archives.

13 Ellsworth Kelly, interview by author, 12 February 1990.

14 Ellsworth Kelly to Hilla Rebay, 29 November (1952?), Hilla Rebay Archives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York.

15 See Bois, pp. 11-12.

16 Michael Seuphor, "Tendance," Derrikre le miroire 50 (October 1952): 2.

17 It is significant that in the 1990 exhibition that Ellsworth Kelly curated at the Museum of Modern Art called "Fragmentation and the Single Form," Matisse and Mondrian are the only artists represented with two examples of their

work. Other artists are accorded only one work.

18 Neff, pp. 28-29.

19 See Jack Cowart, Introduction, in Henri Mattise, ed. Cowart, pp. 15-16. Traditionally, the term collage has designated works that use preexisting objects, found objects, or assemblage to obfuscate conventional narrative or, in the dada sense, coherent interpretation. Neither Matisse nor Kelly were operating within this tradition.

20 Diane Upright, Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Fort Worth Art Museum, 1987), p. 18.

21 Kelly, interview by author, 12 February 1990; and Kelly to John Cage (1950), quoted in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, p. 187.

22 Vasarely's ideas were shared by many of the artists who exhibited with the Galerie Denise Rend in the 1950s and may have accounted for Kelly's desire to join the gallery. After considering his application, however, the other artist members voted not to accept him into the gallery. Kelly, interview by author, 12 February 1990.

23 Victor Vasarely, "Yellow Manifesto" (1955), reprinted in Art of Our Century, ed. Jean-Louis Ferrier (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall Press, 1989), p. 521.

24 "Ellsworth Kelly: Paintings May 21-June 8, 1956," checklist, Betty Parsons Gallery, Betty Parsons Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. For details of the commission, see Patterson Sims and Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982), pp. 58-61.

25 Ellsworth Kelly, "Statement" (1957?), Betty Parsons Papers.

26 Jack Youngerman, interview by Colette Robert, February 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

53 American Art


Article Contentsp. 37p. [36]p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42p. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53

Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Art, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 1-120Front Matter [pp. 1-1]Art OnlineConversation in Cyberspace: An Online Chat with Elizabeth Broun [pp. 2-13]

Home Again: Worthington Whittredge's Domestic Interiors [pp. 14-35]"Things to Cover Walls": Ellsworth Kelly's Paris Paintings and the Tradition of Mural Decoration [pp. 36-53]Bullfights and Balconies: Flirtation and Majismo in Mary Cassatt's Spanish Paintings of 1872-73 [pp. 54-71]Rereading the Indian in Benjamin West's "Death of General Wolfe" [pp. 72-85]Mammy the Huckster: Selling the Old South for the New Century [pp. 86-109]Personal Selection from the Collection of the National Museum of American ArtWill Barnet and the Family [pp. 110-115]

American Archives from the Peter A. Juley and Son Collection, National Museum of American ArtWill Barnet [pp. 116]

Letters to the EditorBarnett Newman and the Kabbalah [pp. 117-118]A Layperson's Wish List [pp. 118-120]

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Things to Cover Walls