ART-PRESENTATION: Ellsworth Kelly-Postcards

Spanning seven decades, Ellsworth Kelly’s career is marked by the independent route his art has taken from any formal school or art movement, and by his innovative contribution to twentieth-century painting and sculpture. Kelly draws on the connection between abstraction and nature from which he extrapolates forms and colors. Since the beginning of his career, Kelly’s emphasis on pure form and color, and his impulse to suppress gesture in favor of creating spatial unity have played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum

The exhibition “Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards”, is a comprehensive survey of postcard collages  Ellsworth Kelly, marking the first time Kelly’s lifelong practice of collaged postcards will be the focus of a major museum exhibition. Widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, he is known for his abstract paintings, sculptures, and prints that are masterworks in the exploration of line, form, and color. Over the course of more than fifty years, the artist made approximately 400 postcard collages, some of which served as exploratory musings and others as studies for larger works in other media. They range from his first monochrome in 1949 through his last collages of crashing ocean waves, made in 2005. Together, these works show an unbounded space of creative freedom and provide an important insight into the way Kelly saw, experienced and translated the world in his art. The exhibition includes 150 such works, including “Coenties Slip” (1957), in which Kelly superimposes a torn-out magazine image of abundant fruit over a picture postcard of Lower Manhattan that includes Coenties Slip, the neighborhood where he lived and worked in the late 1950s through mid-1960s. “Horizontal Nude or St. Martin Landscape” (1974) features a partial female torso torn from a magazine superimposed over the middle of a tourist postcard, obscuring most of the tropical landscape, but revealing a small pond in the foreground, and a background with sharp peaks of hills, deep blue water, and light blue sky. At once, this postcard collage illustrates Kelly’s vision and play with scale shifts, and serves as an artifact of Kelly’s history of visiting St. Martin, where he often stayed with his friend, the artist Jasper Johns, who has had a home on the island since the early 1970s. Other postcards reference Paris, where Kelly lived in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and where he often returned, or other cities like New York and Los Angeles. “My New Studio” (1970) is a picture postcard of downtown Old Chatham, New York, with a stapled arrow pointing to the second-floor windows of his new studio building, in a town where Kelly relocated and worked for five decades. These revealing biographical details make the postcard collages unique among Kelly’s works. They overflow with collage and pattern, and a playfulness that is less overt in his formally rigorous paintings and sculpture. For example, in “Colossal Head of Harrison Ford” (1984), Kelly situates the movie star’s head heroically on a beach landscape. Also in 1984, Kelly folded and collaged a torn piece of white and red paper over one side of a postcard reproduction of the early Edgar Degas painting Young Spartans Exercising (1860), thus asserting his own place amid important works of art history.

Photo: Ellsworth Kelly, St. Martin- Baie Rouge, 2005, 4 5/8 x 6 3/4; inches, collection of Ellsworth Kelly Studio and Jack Shear, © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation

Info: Curators: Ian Berry and Jessica Eisenthal, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA, Duration: 10/7-28/11/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 12:00-17:00, https://tang.skidmore.edu