SFMOMA, Floor 5 · Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form.

The Kelly South gallery holds six works made in France between 1949 and 1953, when Ellsworth Kelly was in his twenties, broke, and almost unknown. A window, a roadside marker, the shadow of a stair rail: each painting starts from something he saw and stripped down until only its shape was left. "I realized I didn't want to compose pictures," he said. "I wanted to find them." This room is where he learned how.

Birds, Camouflage, and the G.I. Bill (1923–1948)

Ellsworth Kelly was born on May 31, 1923, in Newburgh, New York, the second of three sons. His father was an insurance executive, his mother a former schoolteacher, and the family moved to Oradell, New Jersey. When he was eight or nine, his grandmother took him birdwatching near the Oradell Reservoir. He kept looking at birds all his life, and John James Audubon's prints mattered to him. The critic Eugene Goossen later suggested that Kelly's two- and three-color paintings trace back to the birds: a few flat colors, sharply bordered, seen at a glance.

He studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1941 until he was drafted on January 1, 1943. He asked to join the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, part of the unit now known as the Ghost Army, which fooled German intelligence with inflatable tanks, fake radio traffic, and sound effects. In Europe, Kelly mostly drove a truck. But a camouflage unit is a lesson in how shapes and shadows read from a distance, and in how a flat thing can pass for a solid one.

After the war, the G.I. Bill paid for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1946–47). In 1948 he moved to Paris.

Paris (1948–1954)

He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and rarely went to class. In 1949 he met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and the sculptor Jean Arp; he also met Constantin Brancusi, whose simplified natural forms stayed with him, and visited the studios of Alberto Giacometti, Francis Picabia, and Georges Vantongerloo. Arp and Cage both used chance in their work. SFMOMA notes that chance "had a major impact on how Kelly constructed his compositions."

By May 1949 he had made his first abstract paintings. They were not abstract in the usual sense. Each one began with something real.

The Room

Window I (1949). Gesso and oil on wood, about two feet tall. A black upright bar crossed by three black horizontal bars on an off-white ground that is stained and cracked like an old wall. A window seen flat on: the frame and crossbars, with the glass and the view taken out. This is one of Kelly's first steps toward his method. SFMOMA writes that Kelly himself credited Window I and White Relief with leading to his multipanel paintings. The painting is not a picture of a window but an object built like one.

Kilometer Marker (1949). Gesso, graphite, and oil on wood, about 21 by 18 inches. In the summer of 1949 Kelly went with a friend to Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany. In SFMOMA's audio, he says this was one of the first paintings he made there, after cycling past a roadside marker every day. An off-white rectangle with a rounded yellow top, divided by one line, the shape of a French road marker. "Like going up into the mountain," he says. A stone on the side of the road becomes a painting by being looked at long enough.

White Relief (1950). Oil on wood. An all-white panel with sixteen small raised polygons in a four-by-four grid. Here there is no color at all. The only drawing is done by light: each raised shape throws a shadow, and the shadows change as you move. In SFMOMA's audio, curator Gary Garrels says Kelly's reliefs make shadow an active part of the work, and treat painting as continuous with sculpture.

La Combe III (1951). Oil on linen, about five feet by three and a half. Irregular blue marks dart across a white ground, dense along the top, scattered below. It looks like pure invention. It isn't. In the summer of 1950 Kelly stayed at Villa La Combe in France and made sketches and photographs of the shadow that a stair rail threw across the steps. "I watched it change with the sun, you see," he says in SFMOMA's audio. The La Combe series came out of those studies and out of his experiments with chance. A shadow is already a flat shape; Kelly only had to pick which moment to keep.

Red Yellow Blue White and Black with White Border (1952–1953). Oil on canvas, seven separate panels in a row, about three and a half feet tall and almost thirteen feet long altogether. Blue, red, white, black, yellow, white, blue. Each canvas is one color. The painting is the row: no brushwork, no image, only how the colors sit next to each other. In 1951 Kelly had begun Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance, assigning colors to numbered slips of paper to decide where each went. Here the colors are few and the panels are separate, but the idea is the same: the painting is an arrangement, not a composition.

Spectrum I (1953). Oil on canvas, five feet square. Fourteen vertical bands run from yellow through greens, blues, purples, reds, and oranges, and back to yellow. SFMOMA's label points out what makes it strange: unlike a rainbow, it begins and ends with the same yellow, and the gradual shift from green to golden orange makes the two ends hard to tell apart. The color loops. In the early 1950s the twelve hues of the color wheel became the core of Kelly's palette. He went on to make eight Spectrum paintings between 1953 and 2014. This is the first, easel-sized. The last is an installation nearly fifty feet long.

In these six works, Kelly's question shifts. In 1949 he was asking what shape a real thing makes. By 1953, he was asking what color does on its own. SFMOMA puts it this way: for Kelly, "color does not define form but in itself can become form."

Leaving France

Kelly had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951. Almost nothing sold. In 1953 he was evicted from his studio, and in 1954 he went back to New York, having sold, by most accounts, one painting in six years. He settled at Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where Agnes Martin, whose room is on Floor 4, was a neighbor and sometimes shared studio space. The next post picks up there.

How These Works Came to San Francisco

All six paintings in this post came to SFMOMA in May 1999, among twenty-two works the museum acquired from Kelly's own collection. The museum called it "one of the most significant commitments any museum has made to a living artist." The credit lines name the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection and a promised gift from Helen and Charles Schwab. The holding is strongest in exactly these years, 1948 to 1954, which makes this room one of the best places anywhere to see how Kelly started. 🌁

Timeline — Ellsworth Kelly, 1923–1954

• May 31, 1923 — Born in Newburgh, New York.

• c. 1931–1932 — Starts birdwatching with his grandmother near the Oradell Reservoir.

• 1941 — Enters Pratt Institute.

• January 1, 1943 — Drafted; joins the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion.

• 1946–1947 — School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on the G.I. Bill.

• 1948 — Moves to Paris.

• By May 1949 — First abstract paintings; meets John Cage and Jean Arp.

• Summer 1949 — Belle-Île; Kilometer Marker. Window I the same year.

• 1950 — White Relief; shadow studies at Villa La Combe.

• 1951 — La Combe III; begins Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance; first solo show, Galerie Arnaud.

• 1952–1953 — Red Yellow Blue White and Black with White Border.

• 1953 — Spectrum I; evicted from his Paris studio.

• 1954 — Returns to New York; settles at Coenties Slip.

• May 1999 — SFMOMA acquires twenty-two works from Kelly's own collection.