It was the opening day of Art Basel, the world’s most prestigious annual art
fair, last Tuesday. People had jetted in from around the world to stock up
on all the contemporary scene’s latest stars. But it wasn’t Tracey Emin,
Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Gerhard Richter who were drawing the crowds.
Nor was it Brad Pitt, Roman Abramovich, Owen Wilson, Patti Smith or any of
the other celebrities wandering around looking for something new to decorate
their walls. In a corner of the show it was a small but solid, bespectacled,
85-year-old man who was posing for photos with his starstruck fans.
To look at him, you’d never guess that Ellsworth Kelly is 85. He may forget
the odd name these days, but he strolls around, cheerfully chatting in a
strong, clear voice with a half-dozen people, totally switched on. But even
now, with his work in every major museum, he still feels like an outsider.
“I always have been,” he says with a wry smile. “But, you know you begin as
an outsider and then . . .” he tails off, searching for the right word
before shouting: “ I’m still at it!” with an almost
maniacal laugh. It’s clear that he’s going to make art for as long as he
physically can. After the death of Robert Rauschenberg last month, Kelly
(along with his friend, the painter Jasper Johns) is one of the last
survivors of a golden age of American painting.
He was born in New York State, the second of three sons of an insurance
company executive and a schoolteacher, and spent much of his childhood in
New Jersey. He first rose to prominence as an artist during the mid1950s, at
a time when the New York scene was dominated by Abstract Expressionists such
as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, who splashed and
threw paint around in a macho, gestural manner that celebrated the presence
of the painter in the painting.
Kelly presented the opposite of Pollock’s splatters and drawings. He made
geometrically shaped canvases painted-in a single, bright, uniform colour,
sometimes arranged in clusters and inspired by European painters such as
Picasso, Matisse and Léger, and sculptors such as Brancusi and Arp, whom
Kelly met in Paris. He had gone to study at the École des Beaux Arts on the
GI Bill, having served in the US Army as part of a unit called “the Ghost
Army”, where, alongside other artists, he used inflatable tanks and trucks
to mislead Axis forces about Allied troop movements. You could call his
single-colour paintings the ultimate camouflage experiment.
But, at a time when America was celebrating one of its first internationally
significant home-grown art movements, his European-inspired stuff didn’t
immediately catch on. “People were sort of confused by it and ignored it”,
Kelly recalls, after I’ve managed to drag him away from the art dealer
Irving Blum, who bought one of the first paintings Kelly sold in New York
for $75 (paid for in monthly $5-dollar installments) in 1957.
Today, Kelly’s career is a chapter in every history of modern American art. It
incorporates elements of some of postwar art’s biggest movements: Hard-Edge
and Colour Field painting, Minimalism and Postminimalism. A retrospective
show of his work at Basel sold out in just a few hours. These days $75
wouldn’t even get you his signature.
Much of Kelly’s inspiration is drawn from the art of the past. “I remember at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when I was a kid, someone asked me if there
was a painting I liked very much,” he says. There was a landscape of
L’Estaque [by Cézanne] – a huge blue sea with a town along the edge. I liked
that blue shape. And that’s what my paintings are about, shape and colour.”
It’s not just paintings that Kelly sees in this way; it’s everything around
him; it’s wired into his brain. “I’m looking at you and behind your head is
this red,” he continues. “And I’m comparing it to your flesh and your
eyebrows and the blue-black that you’re wearing. I can look at you and not
see you. I see that instead – it takes over your head.” Although Kelly is
known as an abstract painter, his work derives from observations of the
world around him. He draws when he travels, works up new ideas daily when
he’s back in Spencertown, the small town in upstate New York where he lives.
Crucially, he points out, his work is something that should be felt rather
than considered. He recalls seeing a painting by Chaim Soutine of a man
returning to a village, his arms outstretched and his head thrown back so
that it disappeared entirely: “That’s how I want my paintings to be –
headless. Not thought but felt. I like to put the mind to rest.”
How does the man inspired by the past feel about exhibiting alongside the
stars of today? “Art has changed so much over the past 10 or 15 years,” he
says. “Young people are making it in a different way. They’re doing work
that has changed the way you look at pictures – installation work. It’s
different from looking at Soutine. That’s more my style. I’ve known those
paintings all my life. If I see a Cézanne painting, even the same one
several times, I see it differently every time.”
Kelly is diplomatic, yet it’s clear that he doesn’t completely approve of
their art. “I’m not so sure that young painters are thinking about
permanence,” he says. “They’re thinking of something more fashionable,
that’s part of the style right now. But you want your pictures to be part of
the future.”
His Basel show begins with a self-portrait from 1949 – a young man’s face
staring self-consciously out at the viewer. Kelly has said in the past that
he was a loner as a child, and suffered from a slight stutter. I wonder if,
when he drew this self-portrait, he thought his future would ever lead him
to the position of prominence he enjoys today.
“When you are young, you think your art can change the world,” he says with a
twinkle in his eye. “I was looking at it the other day, because I hadn’t
seen it in a while and noticed that one eye was looking straight ahead and
the other to the side. When I was younger people would say that I had one
eye that was not quite parallel. I hadn’t thought about it for years until I
saw it in that drawing. I guess I cured myself of that. But I guess all my
abstract paintings are self-portraits.”
Does he still think he can change the world at 85? He laughs. “No. Look what
America’s been doing with this war in Iraq.” Back in New York he’s just
finished a painting about the war, “a little grim, a lot of black”. So what
now drives him to carry on? “It’s never enough. You always want something
else. I have to really do something I haven’t seen before and that gets
harder and harder. But I look around and see that everything is usable.”
He points out a blonde sashaying by in a very short blue dress. “Wow, look at
that,” he says excitedly. “That’s nice,” he eventually says, “those short
dresses that change the shape of the body.”
There’s a final question I’ve always wanted to ask him: his favourite colour.
“The one I’m painting,” he replies with a grin. “I love black and white too,
and I’m working on a series now on panels laid one on top of the other.
That’s something new for me. And if it’s new for me a lot of people don’t
get it.” Except that a recent show of the new works sold out.
“You’re looking good in black and blue,” he calls out as I walk away.
Ellsworth Kelly’s work features in Fernand Léger: Paris–New York, at the
Fondation Beyeler, Basel (www.beyeler.com),
until September 7 2008
