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

Three of Kelly's four rooms on this floor cover the forty-five years after he came home: color panels in the West gallery, large single forms in the North, and curves in the last room. The France years had taught him to find a shape in the world. What he did for the rest of his life was make that shape bigger, flatter, more exact, and then cut the canvas to fit it. "I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity," he said in 1996, "a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living."

Coenties Slip (1954–1970)

Back in New York in 1954, Kelly settled at Coenties Slip, the row of old lofts at the tip of Manhattan where Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana, and Jack Youngerman also worked. He sometimes shared studio space with Martin. He met Indiana in 1956; they became partners, and Kelly mentored him until they split around 1964. In May 1956 the Betty Parsons Gallery gave him his first New York solo show.

New York painting in 1956 was still dominated by Abstract Expressionism: big gestures, visible struggle. Kelly's paintings had none of that. Flat color, hard edges, no trace of the hand.

The Room: Kelly West

Gaza (1956). Oil on canvas, about seven and a half feet by six and a half. Four stacked canvases, edge to edge, in yellows and oranges, with a narrow red-orange band on top. Painted in his second year back, the year of the Parsons show. The joined-panel idea from France is still here, now at the scale of New York painting.

Blue White (1968) and Red Green (1968). Each is two shaped canvases joined into one form. In Blue White, about six by thirteen feet, a cobalt-blue triangle meets a white rectangle. In Red Green, about nine by eleven feet, a red trapezoid meets a green one along a diagonal. By 1968 Kelly no longer needed a rectangle to hold his colors. Each color now had its own outline, and the outline of the whole painting came from where they met. His first shaped canvas, Yellow Piece, dated from just two years before, 1966.

Blue Green Black Red (1996). Four tall, narrow canvases, each about five feet by two and a half, hung in a row with gaps between. One flat color each. It's a late return to one of his oldest ideas, the separate panels of 1952–53 in the South gallery. The difference is the space between them. In the 1950s the panels touched; here the wall runs between them and becomes part of the painting.

The Fishers knew Kelly personally. In SFMOMA's audio, Doris Fisher and her son John talk about their friendship with him, and John says the family commissioned Kelly to make portraits of his father, Don Fisher, for his seventieth birthday.

The Room: Kelly North

Wall (1958). Oil on canvas, about four and a half by four feet. A large, slightly irregular black shape with slanting white margins and a deeper white band at the bottom. The painting hangs perfectly straight but looks tilted. In SFMOMA's audio, curator Sarah Roberts says it "can't be straightened," and Kelly says he wanted to "leave something open."

Red White (1962). Oil on canvas, about seven feet by five and a half. A big red fan-like shape on white, with two tapering white openings cut into its right side. SFMOMA owns two paintings with this title and date. It bought the first in 1966, its first Kelly. This one belongs to the Fisher Collection; the family acquired it in 1996. In the museum's audio, curator Gary Garrels says Kelly's wartime camouflage work shaped his sense of color, shape, and pattern. He calls the work grounded in close observation of the real world, not invented from imagination or from an intellectual system.

Black over Blue (1963). Painted aluminum, about seven feet tall and six inches deep. A cobalt-blue panel with a curving black form attached in front of it on rounded pegs, running past the top and bottom edges. Here the shape literally leaves the canvas and stands away from the wall.

Curve IX (1974). Aluminum, ten feet tall, less than an inch thick, bolted to the floor. A light-gray upright with softly curving edges. In 1970 Kelly left New York for Spencertown, in upstate New York, and in the 1970s his curves became freestanding sculpture: a painting's outline, cut out of metal and stood up in the room.

Red on Red (2001). Oil on canvas, about seven feet by six and a half. Two nearly square orange-red panels, one offset over the other, making a stepped outline. Late Kelly, at seventy-eight. Two shades of almost the same red. The painting is about the edge where one ends and the other begins.

The Room: Kelly Curves

The last room is all arcs.

Curve III (1974). Weathering steel, about six feet by fourteen, three-quarters of an inch thick, held a few inches off the wall. A rust-brown fan shape with three sharp points.

Diagonal with Curve I (1978) and White Curves I (1978). The first is a tilted white canvas about nine feet tall, one edge straight and one a large arc. The second is painted aluminum: a cream disc with a tall curved panel set in front of it. In both, white makes the outline do all the work.

Curve XXI (1978–1980). Wood, about six feet by fourteen, a thin, symmetrical fan floating off the wall. Same shape family as Curve III, now in pale birch instead of rusted steel.

Blue Panel (1985). Oil on canvas, about nine feet square. A dark navy wedge with a curved top and a pointed bottom.

Red Curves (1996). Oil on canvas, almost twelve feet tall. One flat red form made by two curves meeting at sharp points top and bottom. In SFMOMA's audio, visitors say what it reminds them of: a planet's cross section, a slice of mango, a wound, a sports car, a candle flame, a sail. Curator Sarah Roberts says Kelly draws on memorable images and gives them physical form. That is exactly the point. Kelly found the shape somewhere; you find something else in it.

What the Rooms Show

From Gaza in 1956 to Red on Red in 2001, the means stay almost the same: one color per shape, no brushwork, edges as sharp as cut paper. What changes is how much the shape takes over. First it sits inside a rectangle; then it becomes the canvas; then it leaves the canvas as metal or wood and hangs, leans, or stands in the room.

Jack Shear joined Kelly in Spencertown in 1984, and they lived there together for the rest of Kelly's life. In 2015 Kelly gave the design for Austin to the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas; it opened to the public on February 18, 2018, the only building he designed. He died in Spencertown on December 27, 2015, at ninety-two. 🌁

Timeline — Ellsworth Kelly, 1954–2015

• 1954 — Returns to New York; Coenties Slip.

• 1956 — Meets Robert Indiana; first New York solo show, Betty Parsons Gallery, in May; Gaza.

• 1958 — Wall.

• 1962 — Red White.

• 1963 — Black over Blue.

• 1966 — Yellow Piece, his first shaped canvas; SFMOMA buys its first Kelly, Red White.

• 1968 — Blue White; Red Green.

• 1970 — Moves to Spencertown, New York.

• 1974 — Curve III; Curve IX.

• 1978 — Diagonal with Curve I; White Curves I.

• 1978–1980 — Curve XXI.

• 1984 — Jack Shear joins him in Spencertown.

• 1985 — Blue Panel.

• 1996 — Blue Green Black Red; Red Curves; the Fishers acquire their Red White.

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

• 2001 — Red on Red.

• 2015 — Gives the design for Austin to the Blanton Museum; dies December 27 in Spencertown.

• 2018 — Austin opens.