Product Description

Red Green Blue is almost the title of a 1963 painting by Ellsworth Kelly. Red Blue Green, a monumental rectangular oil work, considered a crucial fulcrum point in the artist's career, represents Kelly's concerns about the tension between the figure and the ground, offering two precisely shaped and balanced red and blue forms set against a strongly contrasting green ground. Working within a strict set of limits, he created a string of similarly grand, powerful works and defined many of the ideas about line, form, and color that still drive his work today. These works, made from the late 50s to the mid-60s, established the artist's singular style and his reputation as one of the most innovative abstract painters of the latter half of the 20th century, one who boldly broke with the strictures of the abstract expressionist movement, which dominated painting in the United States in the 50s. Exploring the complex interplay of invented and real-world inspirations that led to this body of figure/ground paintings, this volume presents a selection of 21 major paintings and 36 related drawings, collages, and photographs from that time period, as well as a new painting from 2002 that reexamines related concerns.
Instead of making a picture that was an interpretation of a thing seen, or a picture of invented content, I found an object and "presented" it as itself alone. --Ellsworth Kelly

Edited by Toby Kamps and Julie Dunn.
Essays by Roberta Bernstein and Sarah K. Rich, Toby Kamps and Dave Hickey.
Introduction by Hugh M. Davies.

Hardcover ,10 x 12 in. 128 pages, 82 color, 6 b/w illustrations

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1322459 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-02
• Released on: 2003-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

About the Author
Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York in 1923. His first one-person exhibition was held in 1951 in Paris, where he was studying on the G.I. Bill following World War II. Kelly returned to the United States in 1954, renting a studio in downtown New York, and his position among America's most esteemed painters began to take form. Since that time, the artist's work has been the subject of numerous major retrospectives worldwide and is presently included in all of the most important public collections of contemporary art. The drawings reproduced in this volume were on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in November, 2006, accompanying a major exhibition of new paintings and sculpture. Kelly currently lives and works in upstate New York.

Roberta Bernstein is a professor at the University of Albany and an expert on American art of the 1960s.

Sarah Rich is assistant professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University and the author of the forthcoming Zip! Barnett Newman in the Sixties.

"Hugh M. Davies has been the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, since 1983. He completed his doctorate at Princeton University, where his dissertation on Francis Bacon was published by Garland, and he has authored numerous exhibition catalogues."

"Toby Kamps is curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. His prior publications include Small Worlds: Dioramas in Contemporary Art, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and 20th Century Mexican Art, and Lateral Thinking: Art of the 1990s."

Customer Reviews

One of the most important post-WWII artists
I live near the museum that houses the magnificent "painting" that is the subject of this great volume. This book has many supplementary plates in color and solid commentary. "Red Green Blue" is deceptively simple - three colors outlined in three shapes. But it is so much more - a work of art that questions the figure/ground function in painting; abstraction vs. representation (sometimes I see a pool and a plot of grass as seen aerially) and field painting's use of pure, non-representational color to create the work of art.