Kelly, Ellsworth, 1923–, American painter, b. Newburgh, N.Y. He moved to New York City in 1941, studying at Pratt Institute, and later attended the Boston Museum Arts School. In Paris during the late 1940s, he studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and met many giants of modern art. He began to create relief sculptures and multipanel paintings, formats that remained features of his work. Returning (1954) to the United States, he became known in the 1950s and 60s for his hard-edge paintings, formal, impersonal compositions painted in flat areas of color, usually with sharp contours and geometric shapes. Increasingly large, some were conventional rectangular canvases, some made up of several single-color panels joined to make triangles, trapezoids, and other shape; Atlantic (1956) and Green Blue Red (1964) are in the Whitney Museum, New York City, and Blue Red Green (1962) in the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Kelly has also made large geometric sheet-metal sculptures, e.g., the work (1957) commissioned for Philadelphia's Transportation Building (now Penn Center), and is a collagist and printmaker.

Bibliography

See studies and catalogs by J. Coplans (1972), E. C. Goossen (1973), R. H. Axsom and P. Floyd (1987), D. Upright (1987), Y.-A. Bois (1992 and 1999), and Diane Waldman et al. (1996).

Kelly, Ellsworth

(born May 31, 1923, Newburgh, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. painter and sculptor. In 1948 the G.I. bill allowed him to travel to Paris, where he was exposed to various avant-garde developments. By 1949 he made his first completely abstract painting; he would create abstract work throughout his career. Kelly moved back to the U.S. in 1954. By the end of the decade he became a leading exponent of the hard-edge style of painting, in which abstract contours and large areas of flat colour are sharply and precisely defined. Influenced by the biomorphic abstractions of Jean Arp and the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse, he used the clean geometric lines of his paintings in painted, cut-out sheet-metal sculptures. Kelly refined his pursuit of pure style throughout the late 20th century, eventually also pursuing printmaking and large-scale public sculpture.

Kelly, Ellsworth (1923– ) painter, sculptor; born in Newburgh, N.Y. He studied at the Boston Museum School under Karl Zerbe (1946–48), in Paris (1948–54), and then returned to New York. Influenced by Jean Arp, he worked in a variety of mediums, and his sculptures are composed of curved metal planes. He was preoccupied with objects as art, color patterns, and random collages, and his shaped canvas, Two Panels: Blue, Red (1968), reveals his exploration of color as emotion.