Ellsworth Kelly

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 13 Number 1, 1993

In this interview, recorded in the October 1992 exhibition at the Anothony d'Offay Gallery in London, the artist dicusses the critical relationship between the placing of his works and the space of the gallery. Interview by William Furlong.

Transcript

This interview took place in October 1992 at Ellwsorth Kelly’s exhibition at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London.

William Furlong: You have written about your preoccupation with the relationship between form and ground.

Ellsworth Kelly: I left America in 1948, after studying at the Boston Museum School, and came to Paris. I decided almost immediately that easel painting did not interest me any more and that I would have to find something else that could satisfy. I started doing paintings in panels; some of the earlier relief paintings were derived from architectural motifs. School of Paris painters like Léger, Picasso and Braque were great artists, but I was not European and there was no tradition for me to continue in this way. Also their painting seemed too man-oriented. I travelled to Romanesque sites and went to the museums and was interested in early art. Somehow or other that led me into doing the panel works. One, two, three or four panels together were solidly coloured, had no marks, and the panel itself became the content. Since the Renaissance, painting has been form and ground sharing the same space. Doing these panel pictures, they became the form, and the wall became the ground. The work sort of came out into the viewer’s world. Painting demands its own space. That is as close as I have ever come to being a political artist. We all want to have our own space.The paintings are perhaps difficult for people who have not been involved in what has been happening to painting for the past 80 or 90 years.

WF: Your works are uncompromising; they are not referential.; they set up very specific relationships to the viewer. One of the obvious relationships is that of scale.

EK: It is you that moves in the room and they are similar to how we relate to sculpture. For me painting is more satisfying if it is slightly larger than me so that it dominates me visually. I feel as if I don’t completely see it, and as I move in front of a painting it changes completely. I want some of the mystery to be there that the person cannot completely capture in one look. We see millions of images all day long, and I think these works are fragments of things that we have seen somewhere.

WF: You mentioned painting in the Renaissance and how from then on the trace of the artist’s hand was present. Another convention that evolved from the Renaissance is the rectangular picture. Your panels often challenge that idea of the regular geometric shape, and as a result they set up tensions within an architectural space which is more often than not rectangular.

EK: Though the earlier pictures were all rectangles and squares, when I returned to America I returned to the ‘form’ and ‘ground’ paintings. I did very large, curved forms. It was as if these kind of biomorphic big black shapes were trying to squeeze the ground out of the picture; there was very little white around the edges. So I decided in about 1959 to cut out the form in metal,. In Paris when you bought stretchers they were either a marine, a landscape or a portrait, and they all had their different proportions. I felt like the rectangle or the square has always been a window, and the content in the paintings was always something that was visible through an aperture. When you look through a door or a window and you start moving, what is inside the window changes very abruptly, and you can make your own abstract pictures that way. My first realisation of that came when I was about 12 years old. One evening when a group of us boys were out on Halloween and it was very dark, I saw through a lit window a red shape, a blue shape and a black shape. I crept up to the window and when I looked in I couldn’t find it, it had disappeared. Then I backed up again and very slowly realised it was a red couch, a blue curtain and a black piece of furniture. It was like abstracting shapes.

WF: How did the artists that you met in Paris influence you?

EK: When I came to Paris I went to see if I wanted to enrol in Léger’s class. I liked his painting very much but I decided that I didn’t want a master, exactly. I wanted to go to the École des Beaux-Arts, where I could come and go as I pleased. I was lucky to visit some artists. I visited Arp several times; I visited Brancusi’s studio. I feel that Brancusi and Arp and his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp and also the late Monet seem to me less personal than, say, Picasso and Braque and the abstract Tachiste painters. Brancusi always had a subject for his works. The way he made them and the way he ended up with the form being the permanent thing about his art influenced me very much. I became very friendly with Vantongerloo, and I remember he used to lecture us a lot and read to us, and I remember thinking, I am so glad I don’t have to have a theory to make my pictures valid. People refer to my paintings as hard edge and geometric, but I feel that they more fragments of the real world. I don’t try to design a picture within the frame, but I need some kind of vision or visual for validity; my eyes are constantly working against what I am looking at without me thinking about what I am looking at but just moving my head and shaping things.

WF: Do you see your work as part of an American tradition?

EK: Of the American artists, Audubon, Calder and the American Indians – the pre-Indians like the mound builders –have influenced me more than painters as such. I wanted not to sign the early paintings, I wanted them to be anonymous. I wanted them to exist as anonymous icons.