Why Is Everybody Picking On Ellsworth Kelly Just Because He Figured Out He Liked Colors And Shapes

By Seth Garth

I don’t usually like to get into the mighty thicket of controversy in the art world not having paid all that much attention to trends over the past several years or more since Sam Lowell and then amateur (her designation) Laura Perkins took over the major assignments in that area. Except now I have been challenged on my defense of one Ellsworth Kelly who passed away a few years ago at an old age after have imbibed various art trends most notably color, the color school that formed at least in part to a reaction against the dominance of abstract expressionism and its going off the deep end.  

Here is how this played out since it is hardly a current controversy or even for that matter an ancient one at this point. A friend of mine and I were walking in the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco when we came upon a series of Ellsworth Kelly paintings, the usual interesting combination of colors and shapes that gave me a gathered collective effect after sitting and observing for a few minutes. That friend asked me point blank whether I liked the configuration or liked any particular piece. I said I liked most of it although I was far from being a color aficionado now, or then when it was serious trend. She responded that the work left her cold, left her somewhat disturbed by the hubris and hinted at the question of questions always hidden in the depths of the art world coterie whether this was really art when you came down to it.    

The match was on. Let’s start off with the true proposition that art is the highest expression of humankind’s capacity to wonder, and to act on that impulse to create some piece of simple beauty in a stark world. The question then becomes taking on the process of decision made throughout history by pros, by the people paying the freight for the productions or by the artist him or herself to create something beyond the mundane to determine what is what in any particular time-or fashion. That is when a million schools contend although more so since the post Renaissance period where fashion and taste have tended to move much faster in the world. Unlike said the period immediately before, medieval times when, the narrow contests were between those who created (and adored) say the Blessed Mother Mary, complete with baby Jesus on lap and putti asunder and the grizzly scenes around the various tortures of Jesus, the Christ before the nailed him to some tree.        

It is that edge, that sense of need to produce something different, to take art in a different direction that has been the most common and explosive development of the last few centuries. And hence to Ellsworth Kelly (and others like the latter Rothko) who having seen high style Impressionism give way to war-torn Surrealism and Dadaism then Abstract Expressionism take the art world by a storm after the latter carnage of World War II reacted in the one of two possible ways-back to some form of representational art which has sustained the profession forever or shift gears and move away from the hodge-podge of abstraction to a more stylized sense of color (and form always together in my book). Brilliant, if not always understandable choice especially with Rothko).       

It is entirely possible (and probable) that my argument will leave that friend who shuttered at colorist works still unconvinced, still shaking her head. But like they say about pornography or other seemingly offensive materials avert your eyes. In any case leave poor Ellsworth alone, please.