Classic Sleeper

By ROBERT HUGHES

It may be coarse to call Ellsworth Kelly, whose excellent retrospective opens the new season at New York's Museum of Modern Art, a sleeper; but it has a degree of truth. Nearly 20 years have gone by since this quiet, theory-shy artist came back from Paris and began turning out his spare, immaculately drafted abstractions amid the fulgid polemics of the New York scene.

They did not "belong" in New York, with the splashy gesture and the stuffed angora goat; and except for the work of one or two painters like Kelly's friend Jack Youngerman, there is not much context for them even today. Since then, orthodoxies have spawned and died in shoals; but though Kelly's work anticipated by years many of their salient features (the minimal look, the use of chance in design, the shaped canvas, the horizontal-stripe picture), he has never been part of a "movement." At 50, painting and sculpting on his Hudson Valley farm, Kelly remains a loner, both in temperament and in style. His pictorial intellect -- graceful, aristocratic, verging on the absolutist but never programmed -- is far removed from the pugnacious limit-pushing and problem-solving of most advanced New York art. Of all living American painters, figurative or abstract, Kelly emerges closest to the spirit of classicism.

The art world tends to pay its dues in a rush, and so it has done with Kelly. The MOMA show is accompanied by two new books on him. One text, by Artforum Editor John Coplans, is well-nigh impenetrable and reads as though creakily translated from German, though it is relieved by fine color plates (Abrams; $35). The other, the show's catalogue, is by Art Historian Eugene Goossen. It is what museum introductions should be but rarely are--warm and scholarly, steadily focused on Kelly's own experiences and their growth into form, and mercifully free from the imbricated jargon of formalist criticism.

The source of Kelly's work is, however obliquely, the world of actuality, of things. In 1949, as a G.I. Bill student in Paris (where he enrolled at that crowded and fusty mill, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts), Kelly was browsing through an exhibition at the Musee d'Art Moderne. It bored him: "I noticed that the large windows between the paintings interested me more than the art exhibited." Afterward he made a construction, almost a scale model, of one of these windows, its glass panes and metal frame mocked up in canvas and wood. "From then on," he told Coplans, "painting as I had known it was finished for me. Everywhere I looked, everything I saw, became something to be made, and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added. I could take from everything; it all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory with its broken and patched panes, lines of a road map, the shape of a scarf on a woman's head, a fragment of Le Corbusier's Swiss pavilion, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street."

Yankee Monet. The world became permeable. Patterns, arcs, straight lines, enclosures and tangencies now became the syntax of Kelly's formal language, in painting as in sculpture. He did not, in short, start from geometry. Thus Relief with Blue, 1950, whose flaring curves channel the eye into a pale blue slot like a narrow doorway, was suggested by the drapery of a set for Jean-Louis Barrault's production of Hamlet, which Kelly saw in Paris. Other paintings evolved from sketches Kelly made of arches reflected in the Seine, of water ripples, or of shadows on the metal staircase of a friend's villa near Meschers in western France, whose changes he recorded hour by hour, like some Yankee Monet laboring at the haystack. Sometimes he would cut up a drawing into rectangles and shuffle them about:

Meschers, 1951, was one result. Originally a scene of green pine trees and blue sea, it became a brisk mosaic of slender, bladelike forms set with cunning ambiguity between figure and field, in a matrix of dark ultramarine. A very "European" painting in its reference to the sharp edges and rich color of Matisse's paper cutouts, it is less so in its novel use of concealed chance.

Relief with Blue was, as Goossen points out, a predictive work. Its curves, both supple and spare, would become one of the marks of Kelly's style. The blue "door" in the middle -- physically enclosed by the lip of white relief around it -- would, in a different way, become another motif. Kelly's mature painting is very much a matter of cut and constriction. Shape burgeons across the canvas, brushing against its edges in such a way that within the bald format there is no dead space. Kelly's paintings are pervaded by a subtly indicated force, a sense of form working under confinement at several points above normal pressure. That Kelly is a most able draftsman can easily be seen from his pencil drawings of leaves and fruit -- but in the abstract mode, he draws like a virtuoso. The decisiveness of the arc in Blue Curve, V, 1973, is (when seen in its large, actual size -- it is about 6 ft. by 9 ft.) breathtaking; no other line, one senses, could have contained the buoyant, intrusive swell of the blue with such steely grace, or struck such a happy proportion with the white.

Only when Kelly denies his work this imagery of encounter and compression does it lean to dullness, as in a set of large rectangular panels, each painted one flat primary color, which have the look of august and boring decoration and cannot hold the eye.

"Cutting directly into color," Matisse wrote in 1947, "reminds me of a sculptor's carving into stone." Kelly's work, both as painter and as sculptor, now seems like a reverberation of that remark: the colors he uses-- red, green, yellow, blue, plus black and white -- are more object than atmosphere. Their presence is dense, their shape irrevocable. This, coupled with the extreme deliberation with which he shaves his contours, makes for very responsible painting. The weight of each decision, every nick and turn of shape, comes to resemble a moral choice. And so Kelly comes out of this show as one of the few artists in America to preserve, almost as subject matter, the seriousness of painting: the conviction that, despite all the trivialization it has undergone, art really matters.

sb Robert Hughes

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