ART & DESIGN

Ellsworth Kelly, Artist Who Mixed European Abstraction Into Everyday Life, Dies at 92

By HOLLAND COTTERDEC. 27, 2015

Ellsworth Kelly, who in the years after World War II shaped a distinctive style of American painting by combining the solid shapes and brilliant colors of European abstraction with forms drawn from everyday life, died on Sunday. He was 92.

His death was announced by Matthew Marks of the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan.

Mr. Kelly’s simple shapes and flat colors — which he sometimes relegated to separate panels — were an important departure form the fussier geometric abstraction, heavily influenced by Mondrian, that most American abstract painters were pursuing at the end of the 1940s. His work was startlingly clean and airy, its plainness creating a bold sense of scale.

Often his paintings consisted of only two colored shapes. Their contrasts could be stark — blue and yellow, or red and white — or subtle, as with two shades of gray. He derived spatial tension from gently curving the edges of shapes, pitting them against the straight edges of the canvas. But he also made some of the first shaped canvases of the postwar period.

Stressing the object quality of his paintings led him almost seamlessly to sculpture simply by freeing his shapes from the wall. The simplicity, flat color and separate panels of Kelly’s work, as well as its bold scale and especially cultivation of a geometry full of flexible organic undertones, formed a crucial foundation for the Minimalists.

Born in Newburgh, N.Y., on May 31, 1923, Mr. Kelly studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after his discharge from the Army in 1945. But his formative years as an artist were in Paris, which he had visited briefly during World War II, and where he returned to live in 1948 with support from the G.I. Bill.

When he arrived, he was painting figures influenced by Picasso and Byzantine mosaics. But he quickly immersed himself in museums, adding both Asian art and Matisse to his eclectic store of influences.

He also spent time outside Paris visiting Romanesque churches, and the relationship between art and architecture remained important to him, evident in the many public commissions he completed late in his career.