Description

The window as motif in the drawings and paintings of Ellsworth Kelly

This monograph was copublished by Cahiers d'Art and Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: Windows, which brought together, for the first time, the six Windows made by Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) in France between 1949 and 1950. Kelly's years in France were a period of perpetual invention, and are fundamental to an understanding of his work. As he wrote in 1969, "After constructing Window with two canvases and a wood frame, I realized that ... painting as I had known it was finished for me." This signal moment is evoked through more than 80 works, paintings, drawings, sketches and photographs, along with two beautiful essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Jean-Pierre Criqui.

Ellsworth Kelly is one of the most important abstract artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as a key figure in the rebirth of Cahiers d'Art: the publishing house was reopened in 2012 with an exhibition of Kelly's work in its legendary gallery, and, in collaboration with Yve-Alain Bois and the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, it published the first volume of Kelly's Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture, 1940-1953.