Curves on White (Four Panels) (2011), © Ellsworth Kelly, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
When an artist reaches the age of ninety, one typically has a pretty good sense of what his or her legacy will be. One expects to see retrospectives abound and celebrations for making it to an age that few artists do. Critical opinion tends to settle around a few key talking points to sum up a career; already one can see, to paraphrase Auden, the works of the old being modified in the guts of the critics. But in the case of Ellsworth Kelly, who turned ninety on May 31, we are given the rare opportunity not only to look back at his career and artistic legacy but also to look forward, as he is presenting new work from the past two years at his longtime New York gallery Matthew Marks. Spanning all three of the gallery’s Chelsea spaces, the show offers fourteen paintings and two sculptures featuring archetypal Kellys as well some work decidedly new.
The highlight of the show is the set of four individual relief paintings collectively titled Curves on White (Four Panels) (2011). On display at the 523 West 24th Street space, the works span nearly fifty feet and are classic Kelly. These four oil on canvas paintings, each composed of two joined panels, hang dramatically at the end of a long hallway on the back wall of a hanger-like gallery and immediately demand one’s attention. Each painting features a simple yet sumptuous monochromatic curvilinear form mounted on a stark white rectilinear background. The colors of the curvilinear forms are, from left to right, red, blue, yellow, and green. The works are a masterful display of balance and judgment, with the red and yellow pieces gently humming off their rectangular backgrounds, while the blue and green works, which cling tightly to theirs, are mounted smartly on more compact squares.
Over at the 502 West 22nd Street space, Kelly shows us something new, with a three-paneled relief painting titled Gold with Orange Reliefs (2013). The work is based on a Kelly collage from 1962 and features two orange, macaroni-shaped panels mounted to the bottom of a gold rectangular background. The shapes call to mind wings against a sunset, but it is the color combination which makes the work notable—this is the first time Kelly has used a metallic color in a painting.
Gold with Orange Reliefs (2013), © Ellsworth Kelly, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Beyond the immediate visual sensation these works provide, they also left me feeling puzzled, but in a good way. There is something oddly compelling or mystical about these pieces, especially Curves on White (Four Panels). Like Stonehenge or some other wonder of the ancient world, these four paintings, like many of the best works from Kelly’s career, have a strong visual power and they feel important, even if their meaning remains impossible to discern. It’s not that they feel meaningless, simply that their meaning has been swallowed up by history and time.
Yet for all their compelling visual power, I left these works wondering if Kelly is truly a “great” artist. Undoubtedly, he is in the conversation when we start to ask who is the greatest living American artist. If I were to try to sum up the achievements of Kelly with a single sentence I would say that he fused a Matisse-like love of the interplay of simple line, form, and color with the size, scale, and organic abstraction that defined much of twentieth century American Modernism. I will go even further and add that his work draws on one of the central tensions of American culture; as the former Museum of Modern Art curator William Rubin put it, Kelly’s “introduction of intense color into a starkly reserved and ascetic style, [produced] a peculiarly American combination of the hedonistic and the puritanical.”
But as good and exquisitely done as many of his works are, are they not also, in a way, narrow and partial in their ambition? Do any of his individual works spring to mind as an undisputed masterpiece? Does his oeuvre have the magnitude, completeness, and range that one associates with true “greatness”? He is the master of minimalism who doggedly, and seemingly happily, explored his own aesthetic through painting, sculpture, drawing, and prints, but did he say enough, even if he always said it well?
These are questions I’m not sure I’m able to answer. I willingly concede that Kelly’s relentless exploration of his minimalist vision and the development of his own personal artistic vocabulary, rather than limitations, may be the very things that make him truly great. What I do know, however, is that Kelly is an important, original, and serious artist—qualities which cannot be overlooked in an art climate where frivolity thrives. But at the rate Kelly is going, I don’t have to decide now. I’ll just wait to see what surprises he has in store for us for his hundredth birthday.
“Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety” is on view through June 29, 2013, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. at 502 and 522 West 22nd Street and 523 West 24th Street, New York.