Ellsworth Kelly: Colors for a Large Wall: Moma One on One Series

Jodi Hauptman examines the procedures and context behind Kelly’s formative 1951 abstraction

Ellsworth Kelly’s landmark 1951 work Colors for a Large Wall is the culmination of an extraordinarily productive moment in the artist’s early career, a time when he developed his singular form of abstraction. After serving in the US Army during World War II, he returned to France in 1948 and lived and worked there until 1954. Connecting with artists of an earlier generation, discovering Paris with his peers, and surveying monuments of the past, Kelly began an audacious creative journey in which, paradoxically, he sought to eliminate “invention” from the process of making art. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Jodi Hauptman looks closely at the evolution of Colors for a Large Wall, unpacking Kelly’s toolbox of close observation of the world, chance procedures, collage and the monochrome, and examining his ambition to create art on a public, architectural scale.