Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VI, 1951
Cut-and-pasted colour-coated paper and pencil on four sheets of paper
95 x 95 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased with funds given by The Edward John Noble Foundation, The Herbert and Nanette Rothschild Fund, and Mrs. Pierre Matisse, 2000

Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance II, 1951
Cut-and-pasted colour-coated paper and pencil on four sheets of paper
97 x 97 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased with funds given by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder

While living in Paris in 1951, Kelly became enamoured with the adhesive-backed coloured paper available at the local art shop. Buying up a supply of many colours, he used it to make the small squares for the eight large collages he titled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance. As the titles suggest, Kelly created the collages by randomly giving numbers to colours that then found pre-assigned places in a pencilled grid. More ordered than Henri Matisse, less purist than Piet Mondrian, they charted new territory in Kelly’s artistic career.

Study for Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Collage
20 x 20 cm
Private Collection

Colors for a Large Wall, 1951
Oil on canvas, sixty-four panels
240 x 240 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist

This eight-foot-square painting is actually sixty-four one-foot-square paintings, individually painted and stretched. Kelly's radical innovation here was prompted by practicality: living in a fishing village in southern France, he did not have the space to store or the money to ship a large work. The colours' arrangements correspond to the coloured squares in a small collage that Kelly made 'very, very quickly, without thinking' with leftovers from the series of Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance.

Méditerannée, 1952
Oil on wood
150 x 194 x 7 cm
Tate. Lent from a private collection 2002

Méditerannée is Kelly's first purely abstract relief, an experiment in the shaping of pure, unmodulated colour. Although entirely abstract, the geometric pictorial shapes that Kelly uses always have their basis in the visible reality of his surroundings: 'I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.'.

Nine Squares, 1976-7
Screenprint and lithograph on paper
103 x 103 cm
Tate