"ELLSWORTH KELLY: A RETROSPECTIVE" par Diane WALDMAN. Editions Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York. 1996. Imprimé en Allemagne. Fort in-4 carré, dos droit, couverture souple cartonnée illustrée en couleurs. 336 pages. Textes en anglais de Diane Waldman, Roberta Bernstein, Carter Ratcliff, mark Rosenthal, Clare Bell, illustré de très nombreuses reproductions photographiques noir & blanc et couleurs, sous la forme de vignettes hors texte ainsi que 164 hors texte d'œuvres d'Ellsworth Kelly. Ouvrage réalisé dans le cadre de l'exposition éponyme itinérante au Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, du 18 Octobre 1996 au 15 Janvier 1997 ; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, du 16 Février au 18 Mai 1997 ; Tate Gallery, Londres, du 12 Juin au 07 Septembre 1997 ; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Novembre 1997 - Janvier 1998.

 

"By now the multipanel painting is a familiar entity used as a formal or narrative device by contemporary artists working in a variety of Postmodernist directions. These artists inherited an attitude toward the painting as object that has become a central feature of late twentieth-century art. This attitude was forged during the 1950s and 1960s by artists with roots in European Modernism but who brought an American brand of empiricism to their rethinking of the relationship of art and reality. Ellsworth Kelly was one of the first and most significant of these artists to do so. For Kelly, the use of joined panels allowed him to find a new way to free shape and color from representation and established his unwavering commitment to abstraction in his painting and sculpture… Kelly's "panel pictures" (as he often refers to them) represent a radical break from both Renaissance illusionist painting and twentieth-century geometric abstraction. However, there are precedents for his panels in medieval and Renaissance polyptychs, especially Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, a favorite work of Kelly's since his student years. The altarpiece format was used in the first half of the twentieth century by the German Expressionists, culminating in Max Beckmann's monumental triptychs, which Kelly also admired. But multiple panels were rarely used by the early Modernist abstractionists, the few exceptions, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, and Pure Blue Color (collectively known as The Last Painting), 1921, are relevant to understanding the history behind Kelly's art and the phenomenon of multipanel painting in general during the second half of the century…" Roberta Bernstein.

 

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