Displaying items by tag: ellsworth kelly

As a young American in Paris in 1949 — four years out of the Army and one year out of a Boston art school — Ellsworth Kelly had an epiphany. The key to creative inspiration was in the world around him, not in other artists' studios or at the Louvre. If he paid close attention to, say, the contour of a window, the shape of a leaf, the play of light and shadows on man-made and natural forms, his art would emerge.

Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced that Baltimore businessman, author, and collector Stephen M. Salny has made a promised gift to the museum of 48 works on paper created by some of today’s leading contemporary artists, including 11 lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly. Among the other artists represented in the gift are Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell, and Sean Scully.

Salny’s gift will augment strengths of the Rose Art Museum collection, which includes paintings and other works by some of the artists included, notably Kelly, Johns, Motherwell, and Frankenthaler, while also extending its holdings in new directions, including the first work by Hirst to by acquired by the museum.

The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin has announced that it will begin construction of Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin in October. A groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for October 31, and the building is projected to open to the public in late 2016 or early 2017. In celebration, the Blanton will host, on October 31, a symposium on Kelly with leading scholars and curators from across the country.

The project was announced in February, and the Blanton has received formal approval from the university’s Board of Regents, clearing the way for construction to begin this fall.

Douglas Druick, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, announced today that Chicago attorney Irving Stenn Jr. has given the museum more than 100 drawings from his exceptional collection of seminal works produced in the 1960s. The drawings, by a who's-who of contemporary artists, represent a foundational period in the history of drawing when the way works on paper were made, used, and appreciated was undergoing radical change.

The gift includes works by Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, and Fred Sandback, as well as pieces by Agnes Denes, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Nam June Paik, and Ellsworth Kelly.

On Friday, February 6, 2015, the Blanton Museum of Art announced that it will acquire and construct Ellsworth Kelly’s only building. Kelly, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with Color Field painting, hard-edge painting, and Minimalism, conceived the stand-alone structure in 1986 for a private collector. At the age of 91, he is finally seeing the project come to fruition.

Austin, a 73-by-60-foot stone building, will be constructed on the museum’s grounds at the University of Texas at Austin. The structure will feature luminous colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture, and fourteen black-and-white stone panels in marble -- all designed by the artist.  Kelly has gifted the Blanton the design concept for the work, including the building, the totem sculpture, the interior panels, and the glass windows. Once it is complete, Austin will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. The Blanton has launched a campaign to raise $15 million to realize the project and has received commitments totaling $7 million.

On Saturday, January 31, 2015, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, will unveil its reinstalled collections of post-war and contemporary art. Featuring work from 1945 to the present, the collections will be housed in three dedicated galleries that have been newly renovated and refurbished over the past year.

The Wadsworth’s illustrious post-war and contemporary holdings will be divided between the Huntington Gallery, where mid-century abstract painting and sculpture by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Tony Smith will be displayed; the Hilles Gallery, which will feature works by Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Richard Tuttle; and the Colt building’s mezzanine gallery, where one of Sol LeWitt’s famed wall drawings will be on view as well as works by other minimalists and conceptualists.

"New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 – 1970" was the Met’s most exciting exhibition to date under the auspices of director Thomas Hoving, who turned Henry Geldzahler loose to prick the art world to alertness. Paul Kasmin Gallery announces "The New York School, 1969: Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," on view at 293 Tenth Avenue from January 13 – March 14, 2015. Curated by Stewart Waltzer, this comprehensive group show reprises Geldzahler’s seminal exhibition and includes exemplary works by Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenberg, Jules Olitski, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, featuring works from the original exhibition.

Impressionist Claude Monet is one of history's most famous artists. Hard-edge painter Ellsworth Kelly is equally illustrious in contemporary circles.

They never met in person. Kelly was 3 when Monet died in 1926 at 86. Their approaches and their art could not be more different.

Yet their worlds intersected for a moment in 1952, an encounter illuminated in an exhibition that opened this weekend at the Clark Art Institute. "Monet / Kelly," featuring nine paintings by Monet and 20 artworks by Kelly, all but two of them drawings, runs through Feb. 15.

On September 21, Stanford University will reveal the Anderson Collection, one of the most valuable gifts in its history. Assembled over the course of fifty years by Bay area collectors Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson along with their daughter Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, the collection features 121 works by 86 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly. While Abstract Expressionist works form the collection’s core, the Andersons’ gift also includes a number of works from California art movements such as the Bay Area Figurative School, which started in San Francisco in the 1950s, and the Light and Space movement, which originated in Southern California in the 1960s.

The Andersons began collecting art after their first visit to the Louvre in 1964. Before focusing on works by Abstract Expressionists, Color Field painters, and Pop artists, they acquired a number of works by French Impressionists and American modernists.

While the National Gallery of Art’s East Building galleries are closed for renovations, the Modern masterpieces that usually reside within their walls have headed from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. “Modernism from the National Gallery of Art: The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection” is currently on view at the de Young Museum and presents 46 paintings and sculptures by postwar masters, including Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. The show marks the first time that the Meyerhoff Collection has been exhibited outside of the greater Washington, D.C., and Baltimore metro areas.

The exhibition is divided into three generational groupings, creating a sweeping view of American Modern art from the end of World War II through the close of the 20th century. Highlights from the show include Stella’s geometric canvas “Flin Flon IV” (1969), Johns’ haunting encaustic “Perilous Night” (1982), Lichtenstein’s Pop art gem “Painting with Statue of Liberty” (1983), and Barnett Newman’s “The Stations of a Cross” (1958-66), a series of paintings, widely considered to be the Abstract Expressionist artist’s most import work. The canvases will be displayed in their own intimate gallery so that they can be experienced as a single work, as the artist intended.