About this artwork
Emphasizing the basics of line, shape, and color, Ellsworth Kelly’s exquisitely spare paintings and sculpture influenced the development of Minimalist art and affected the course of color-field painting, hard-edge painting, and postpainterly abstraction. Among the Art Institute’s rich holdings of Kelly’s works, Red Yellow Blue White and Black stands apart: with startling clarity, this painting marks the moment at midcentury when Kelly’s pure abstraction emerged in its mature form. After serving in World War II, the artist returned to Europe in 1948, living and working in France for the following six years. While abroad, Kelly expanded his practice of direct observation of nature and architectural forms into an experimental, rigorous study of abstraction. He made Red Yellow Blue White and Black in 1953 while still in France, creating it just as he was beginning to uncover the nearly infinite possibilities of monochrome, color spectrum, chance ordering, and multipanel composition. In the painting, Kelly centered the black panel so that it both divides and joins the three panels on either side of it, while the white panels simultaneously separate colors and pair them off. The blue panels at either end close and unify the sequence. Kelly’s multipanel monochromes rely on the edges where sections meet, instead of handmade marks, to express their form. This seven-panel painting is the largest in a sequence of Paris-based works widely considered to be the artist’s finest and most influential early statements on canvas.
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Status
- On View, Gallery 295
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Department
- Contemporary Art
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Artist
- Ellsworth Kelly
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Title
- Red Yellow Blue White and Black II
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Place
- United States (Artist's nationality:)
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Date
- 1953
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Medium
- Oil on canvas; 7 joined panels
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Dimensions
- 99.1 × 350.2 cm (39 × 138 in.)
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Credit Line
- Gift of the Anstiss and Ronald Krueck Collection
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Reference Number
- 2001.157
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Copyright
- © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation
Extended information about this artwork
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