A Brief Survey of Ellsworth Kelly

When people that are new to Ellsworth Kelly or new to art in general view his works for the first time there is a tendency to believe that his work has no depth and is very simple. I was in that camp until I started reading about his life and learning what to look for in his art. I was struggling with how to open this essay on Ellsworth Kelly because I am by no means an expert on his life. I stumbled upon a quote of his that I think about sums up what he was trying to accomplish in his works. He said "I have worked to free shape from it's ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness." My goal, in this essay, is to give a brief chronology of his life, most of which I obtained from Ellsworth Kelly: The early Drawings; and then to examine a few of his works, hopefully relating some of the ideas behind them as well as what they mean to me.

Ellsworth Kelly was born on May 31^st, 1923 in Newburgh, New York. His family soon moved to Pittsburgh and then in 1929, about the start of the Great Depression, moved to New Jersey. They moved around quite a bit while he was growing up. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he attended classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and began his art training.

Then, in 1943, he was drafted into the army and World War II where he ended up serving in France, Germany, and England until the war ended in 1945. He was very lucky when he was drafted in that he was placed, upon his own request, in the 603^rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion. The 603^rd was responsible for creating camouflage netting and propaganda posters (which is how Ellsworth learned how to silk-screen) and kept his interest in artistic things alive throughout the war. During his wartime experiences he was unable to visit any of the museums all over western Europe because they were closed due to the war.