After being abroad for six years Kelly's French was still poor and he had sold only one painting. In 1953 he was evicted from his studio and he returned to America the following year. He had become interested after reading a review of an
Ad Reinhardt exhibit, an artist whose work he felt his work related to. Upon his return to New York, he found the art world "very tough." Kelly eventually moved away from
Coenties Slip, where he had sometimes shared a studio with fellow artist and friend
Agnes Martin, to the ninth floor of the high-rise studio/co-op Hotel des Artistes at 27 West 67th Street. Kelly left New York City for Spencertown in 1970 and was joined there by his partner, photographer Jack Shear, in 1984. From 2001 until his death Kelly worked in a 20,000-square-feet studio in Spencertown reconfigured and extended by the architect
Richard Gluckman; the original studio had been designed by
Schenectady-based architects Werner Feibes and James Schmitt in exchange for a site-specific painting Kelly created for them. Kelly and Shear moved in 2005 to the residence they shared until the painter's death, a wood-clad Colonial house built around 1815.
Austin, which Kelly designed thirty years prior, opened in February 2018. Kelly died in
Spencertown, New York on December 27, 2015, aged 92.
Painting While in Paris, Kelly had continued to paint the figure but by May 1949, he made his first abstract paintings. . Kelly was a pioneer of
hard-edge painting in the 1940s and 1950s. Kelly's discovery in 1952 of
Monet's late work infused him with a new freedom of painterly expression: he began working in extremely large formats and explored the concepts of seriality and monochrome paintings. As a painter he worked from then on in an exclusively abstract mode. By the late 1950s, his painting stressed shape and planar masses (often assuming non-rectilinear formats). His work of this period also provided a useful bridge from the vanguard American geometric abstraction of the 1930s and early 1940s to the minimalism and reductive art of the mid-1960s and 1970s. During the 1960s he started working with irregularly angled canvases.
Yellow Piece (1966), the artist's first shaped canvas, represents Kelly's pivotal break with the rectangular support and his redefinition of painting's figure/ground relationship. With its curved corners and single, all-encompassing color, the canvas itself becomes the composition, transforming the wall behind it into the picture's ground. in 2022 In the 1970s he added curved shapes to his repertoire. After leaving New York City for Spencertown in 1970, he rented a former theater in the nearby town of Chatham, allowing to work in a studio more spacious than any he had previously occupied. After working there for a year, Kelly embarked on a series of 14 paintings that would become the
Chatham Series. Each work takes the form of an inverted ell, and is made of two joined canvases, each canvas a monochrome of a different color. The works vary in proportion and palette from one to the next; careful attention was paid to the size of each panel and the color selected in order to achieve balance and contrast between the two. A larger series of twelve works which Kelly started in 1972 and did not complete until 1983,
Gray was originally conceived as an anti-war statement and is drained of color. In 1979 he used curves in two-colour paintings made of separate panels. In reference to his own work Kelly said in an interview in 1996: "I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living. This an illusion, of course. Canvas rots. Paint changes color. But you keep trying to freeze the world as if you could make it last forever. In a sense, what I've tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing." Kelly commented "I realized I didn't want to compose pictures … I wanted to find them. I felt that my vision was choosing things out there in the world and presenting them. To me the investigation of perception was of the greatest interest. There was so much to see, and it all looked fantastic to me."
Ailanthus (1948) is the first plant drawing that he executed in Boston,
Hyacinth (1949) was the first one he did when he was in Paris. Beginning in 1949, while living in Paris (and influenced in this choice of subject by
Henri Matisse and
Jean Arp) he began to draw simple plant and seaweed forms. The plant studies are, for the most part, contour drawings of leaves, stems and flowers done in clean strokes of pencil or pen and centered on the page. He took up printmaking in a concerted fashion in the mid-1960s, when he produced his
Suite of Twenty-Seven Lithographs (1964–66) with Maeght Éditeur in Paris. It was then that he created his first group of plant lithographs. In 1971, he completed four editions of prints and an edition of the multiple
Mirrored Concorde at Gemini G.E.L. His recent editions,
The River,
States of the River and
River II, reflect the fascination with water Kelly possessed since his early days in Paris. In 1975, Kelly was the first artist to exhibit for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art's MATRIX series. The exhibition displayed Kelly's Corn Stalk drawings series and two of his 1974 cor-ten steel sculptures.
Sculpture in
Riehen, Switzerland Although Kelly may be better known for his paintings, he also worked at sculpture throughout his career. In 1958, Kelly conceived one of his first wood sculptures,
Concorde Relief I (1958), a modestly scaled wall relief in elm, which explores the visual play and balance between two rectangular forms layered on top of each other, the uppermost with its top-right and lower-left corners removed. He made 30 sculptures in wood throughout his career. From 1959 onwards, he created freestanding folded sculptures. The
Rocker series began in 1959 after Kelly's casual conversation with
Agnes Martin, who lived below him on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan. Playing with the paper top from a take-out coffee cup, Kelly cut and folded a section of the round object, which he then put on the table and rocked back and forth. Soon after, he constructed his first sculpture-in-the-round,
Pony. The title refers to a child's hobby horse with curving rocker supports. In 1973 Kelly began regularly making large-scale outdoor sculpture. Kelly gave up painted surfaces, instead choosing unvarnished steel, aluminum or bronze, often in totem-like configurations such as
Curve XXIII (1981). While the totemic forms of his freestanding sculptures can measure up to 15 feet tall, his wall reliefs can span more than 14 feet wide. For his 1980s sculptures, during this period of his time in Spencertown, the artist devoted for the first time as much energy to his sculptures as to his painting, and in the process producing over sixty percent of his total 140 sculptures. Many of his paintings consist of a single (usually bright) color, with some canvases being of irregular shape, sometimes called "
shaped canvases." The quality of line seen in his paintings and in the form of his shaped canvases is very subtle, and implies perfection. This is demonstrated in his piece
Block Island Study (1959).
Influences Kelly's background in the military has been suggested as a source of the seriousness of his works. In 2015, he curated "Monet/Kelly" at the
Clark Art Institute. In 1990 Kelly curated the exhibition, "Artist's Choice: Ellsworth Kelly Fragmentation and the Single Form," at the Museum of Modern Art. ==Personal life==