Ellsworth Kelly Was Born 100 Years Ago and Museums Are Commemorating Him with Focused Exhibitions

One of these exhibitions is a show of 25 of Kelly’s sketchbooks at the Museum of Modern Art, which Shear recently gifted to the museum, on view through June 11. Working out compositions on paper first was a regular, if unseen, part of the artist’s practice.

“His sketchbooks reveal the particularities of his unique process—the persistent experimentation and investigation—as well as the real-world references that often inspired his seemingly nonobjective compositions,” notes Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of drawings and prints. Kelly’s creations, constellations of hard-edged abstract shapes in dazzling color, disguise any hint that they’re based in observation of something real. “Both eminently private and practical, these sketchbooks extend a unique behind-the-scenes invitation,” Cherix adds.

Kelly took sketchbooks with him everywhere, but mostly kept them to himself, moving onto the next sketchbook as soon as one was full. “Kelly’s sketchbooks are both the treasure and the treasure map,” says Cherix, “leading us into a secret world where art is lived and breathed.”

Just around the corner from MoMA, the iconic mid-20th-century Lever House office building reopened after a $100 million renovation with an exhibition of Kelly’s later freestanding sculptures in a range of materials such as aluminum, bronze, and wood—including some rarely exhibited maquettes. The yearlong show runs until April 27, 2024.

Another behind-the-scenes look at Kelly’s practice will come through an exhibition opening in the fall at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, focusing on Kelly’s photography. A show linking his photographic work to his paintings and sculptures, it will run from October 15 through January 14, 2024.

Kelly began taking pictures in Paris in the 1950s, while a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, which he attended on the GI Bill (he’d served in the 603rd Engineers camouflage battalion during World War II, designing decoys with other artists and architects). “Photography is for me a way of seeing things from another angle. I like the idea of the interplay of two and three dimensions,” Kelly said about his approach to this medium.

Photography was a tool for Kelly to flatten what he saw in the real world into distinct shapes that could be simplified and separated on canvas. “I want to make a shape that somehow or other is in my mind, or that recalls something once seen,” Kelly told photographer Charles Hagen in 1991. “When you look at the world, everything is separate—each thing is in its own space, has its own uniqueness. When I take photographs I want somehow to capture that.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the experimental postcard collages that Kelly made for more than 50 years will be shown at the Peder Lund Gallery in Oslo.These playful mini artworks, from an artist whose public works are often on a monumental scale, show him transforming postcards from places where he had once lived or visited. The show will run from September 30 to December 16.

Though mostly abstract, the postcards’ connections to places that held meaning for Kelly give a glimpse into his biography. Another such peep at his life story comes through an exhibition of nearly 100 portrait drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, running July 1 through October 23, will display the likenesses Kelly sketched of himself and his friends, lovers, and acquaintances over the course of six decades (a fraction of the roughly 600 portrait drawings he created overall). “They’ve been a well-kept secret for decades,” says Salatino of the portraits, which have sometimes cameoed in other exhibitions but never had such a large, dedicated exhibition.

Kelly was known for his command of color, but he also drew every single day. “I think all my work begins with drawing,” Kelly once said, “including portraits, which I’ve never shown.” The drawings expose a side to his work—his well-practiced draftsman’s hand—that mostly remained in his studio. “He has that mastery, and then that willingness to completely suppress the mastery,” Salatino explains. “It’s not what we associate with Kelly, and we’re trying to change that; we’re trying to grow that notion of what his work is about and what lies just below the surface of that ever-flowing river. There are many aspects to Kelly’s work.”

Another such aspect is the only building that Kelly ever designed and his final work, Austin, on the grounds of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally conceived as a monumental, freestanding sculpture for a collector in California, the abandoned blueprints were resurrected for the Blanton in the final years of Kelly’s life. Almost entirely white on the exterior, with a Romanesque-inspired double-barrel vault, Austin is punctuated with colored glass windows in geometric shapes that project airy hues on the walls inside. In honor of Kelly’s centenary year, Austin will open during special morning hours once a month, so that the stained-glass windows can be seen at their brightest.

Looking at the prism of surprises emerging from Kelly’s meticulously inventoried studio, we can see this veteran artist anew. Always finding fresh ways to look, Kelly was always translating what he saw in the real world—with his camera or with a pencil, on a postcard or at the soaring scale of a 26-foot ceiling.