Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, October 29, 2025 : Ellsworth Kelly, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker (#2404)

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Artist of the Day, October 29, 2025 : Ellsworth Kelly, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker (#2404)

Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.

Kelly was born the second son of three to Allan Howe Kelly and Florence Rose Elizabeth (Githens) Kelly in Newburgh, New York, approximately 60 miles north of New York City. His father was an insurance company executive of Scots-Irish and German descent. His mother was a former schoolteacher of Welsh and Pennsylvania German stock. His family moved from Newburgh to Oradell, New Jersey, a town of nearly 7,500 people. His family lived near the Oradell Reservoir, where his paternal grandmother introduced him to ornithology when he was eight or nine years old.

There he developed his passion for form and color. John James Audubon had a particularly strong influence on Kelly's work throughout his career. Author Eugene Goossen speculated that the two- and three-color paintings (such as Three Panels: Red Yellow Blue, I 1963) for which Kelly is so well known can be traced to his bird watching and his study of the two- and three-color birds he saw so frequently at an early age. Kelly said he was often alone as a young boy and became somewhat of a "loner." He had a slight stutter that persisted into his teenage years.

Kelly attended public school, where art classes stressed materials and sought to develop the "artistic imagination." This curriculum was typical of the broader trend in schooling that had emerged from the Progressive education theories promulgated by the Columbia University's Teacher's College, at which the American modernist painter Arthur Wesley Dow had taught. Although his parents were reluctant to support Kelly's art training, his school teacher, Dorothy Lange Opsut, encouraged him to go further. As his parents would pay only for technical training, Kelly studied first at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which he attended from 1941 until he was inducted into the Army on New Year's Day 1943.

Upon entering the U.S military service in 1943 Kelly requested to be assigned to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, which took many artists. He was inducted at Fort Dix, New Jersey and sent to Camp Hale, Colorado, where he trained with mountain ski troops. He had never skied before. Six to eight weeks later, he was transferred to Fort Meade, Maryland. During World War II, he served with other artists and designers in the Ghost Army, a United States Army deception unit that used inflatable tanks, trucks and other elements of subterfuge to mislead the Axis forces about the direction and disposition of Allied forces. His exposure to military camouflage during the time he served became part of his basic art training.

Kelly used the G.I. Bill to study from 1946–47 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he took advantage of the museum's collections, and then at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While in Boston, he exhibited in his first group show at the Boris Mirski Gallery and taught art classes at the Norfolk House Center in Roxbury. While in Paris, Kelly established his aesthetic.

After being abroad for six years Kelly's French was still poor and he had sold only one painting. In 1953 he was evicted from his studio and he returned to America the following year. He had become interested after reading a review of an Ad Reinhardt exhibit, an artist whose work he felt his work related to. Upon his return to New York, he found the art world "very tough." Although Kelly is now considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American art movement, it was hard for many to find the connection between Kelly's art and the dominant stylistic trends. In May 1956 Kelly had his first New York City exhibition at Betty Parsons' gallery. His art was considered more European than was popular in New York at the time. He showed again at her gallery in the fall of 1957.

Kelly left New York City for Spencertown in 1970 and was joined there by his partner, photographer Jack Shear, in 1984. From 2001 until his death Kelly worked in a 20,000-square-feet studio in Spencertown reconfigured and extended by the architect Richard Gluckman. Kelly and Shear moved in 2005 to the residence they shared until the painter's death, a wood-clad Colonial house built around 1815. Shear serves as the director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. In 2015, Kelly gave his building design concept for a site of contemplation to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin. Titled Austin, the 2,715-square-foot stone building—which features colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture and black-and-white marble panels—is the only building Kelly designed and is his most monumental work. Austin, which Kelly designed thirty years prior, opened in February 2018.

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