Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) was an American painter and sculptor who turned things he saw, a window, a shadow, a leaf, into flat panels of pure color.
Born in Newburgh, New York, he served in the Ghost Army in the Second World War, lived in Paris from 1948 to 1954, and became a leading name in hard-edge abstraction. He is remembered for those panels and for Austin, the only building he ever designed, which opened in Texas in 2018.
His paintings look as if they came from nowhere. Kelly said the opposite: he had stopped wanting to compose pictures, he explained, and wanted to "find them."
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The surprise is where the search ended. The last project of his life began with a television producer who wanted a pavilion on his vineyard near Santa Barbara. Those plans fell through, and in January 2015 Kelly gave the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the design for a stone building of 2,715 square feet, which he named Austin.
It reads as a chapel. Coloured glass fills the windows, fourteen black and white marble panels line the walls, and an eighteen-foot wooden totem stands inside. Kelly was an atheist all his life and never consecrated the place. He said the design drew on the Romanesque and Byzantine art he had studied in Paris on the G.I. Bill, decades before.
He never saw it open. Kelly died on 27 December 2015, and Austin opened on 18 February 2018, twenty-six months later. To see how a soldier who mostly drove trucks ended up designing a chapel without a god, you have to start in wartime Europe.
What You'll Discover
What he did in the Ghost Army.
What he found in Paris.
What a museum window became.
How New York finally noticed him.
What the windows and walls show.