PRESENTATION: Ellsworth Kelly-Postcards, Part II

Ellsworth Kelly made his first postcard collage in 1954 shortly after his return to the United States from Paris, where he had been living since 1948. He would regularly make collages on postcards over the course of the next five decades. Rarely exhibited, and never sold during the artist’s lifetime, Kelly’s postcard collages were often mailed to friends and offer glimpses into the artist’s travels, personal interests, and relationships (Part I).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

A selection of Ellsworth Kelly’s postcard collages dating from 1957 to 1998 is on view. Kelly’s postcards were recently the subject of an exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. 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. Perhaps more than any other work by the artist, Kelly’s postcards illustrate his use of found compositions — from nature, architecture, art history, and popular media — to create his singular, abstract forms. Kelly’s appetite for visual inspiration is manifested in these modest works. “What I’ve tried to capture is the reality of flux,” he stated, “to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.”

Photo: Ellsworth Kelly, Basel III, 1992, Collage on postcard, 4 × 5⅞ inches; 10 × 15 cm, © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and Matthew Marks Gallery

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 6/5-25/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/