Ellsworth Kelly

Although Kelly has been active as an artist since his graduation in 1948 from the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has been a respected, even revered figure on the American scene since he began exhibiting with the Betty Parsons Gallery in the late 1950s, my own reaction to his work has been characterized by a certain respectful reserve rather than any great enthusiasm. My view began to shift as recently as 1996, when the Guggenheim Museum mounted its mammoth survey of abstract art. Kelly was given what to me was a surprisingly large part in that exhibition. And the works held up. Neither in the experience of the exhibition nor in subsequent reflection did Kelly’s stature seem exaggerated. The retrospective of Kelly’s work at the same institution later that year only confirmed this—all the more so considering the disappointment caused by the New York retrospectives of certain more obviously “major” figures like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. Despite that, casual encounters with Kelly’s work continue to reinforce my old suspicion that his work is often attractive but without depth, at best that of the proverbial petit maître. While I hardly expect any critic or historian to adjudicate my aesthetic judgments for me, I was hoping that Yve-Alain Bois’s most recent contribution to the literature on Kelly, another examination of his fruitful and multifaceted early years in France, would give me a clue. Unfortunately for me, in this case Bois has elected to write here as a historian only and not as a critic, which is to say, he mostly assumes that the aesthetic judgments have already been made—that the value of the work and the reason for it are already clear.^ Treating the drawings discussed and reproduced as “a series of windows opened onto the private sphere of the studio” (17), Bois’s essay is structured as biography, however substantial and detailed its attention to Kelly’s artistic thinking, which is seen as being primarily concerne