English
Blue Green Red
Kelly, unlike many painters of his generation, arrived at his abstractions by observing his surroundings. The artist based his shapes, more often than not, on the reality or memory of an architectural motif, recording the interplay of shadows in a stairwell or the curved shape of the Pont Neuf’s reflection on the Seine in Paris—where Kelly spent six years after World War II on the G.I. Bill. Blue Green Red, the first of a series of eight large-scale pictures in these colors, recalls both Kelly’s 1958 painting Mask, inspired by the shadows cast across an open book, and his abstracted landscapes of the 1950s.
Artwork Details
- Title: Blue Green Red
- Artist: Ellsworth Kelly (American, Newburgh, New York 1923–2015 Spencertown, New York)
- Date: 1963
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 91 × 82 in. (231.1 × 208.3 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1963
- Object Number: 63.73
- Rights and Reproduction: © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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2060. Blue Green Red
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