Until this morning, everything I knew about Ellsworth Kelly and pink triangles I had learned from Jonathan Horowitz. In 2010, Horowitz made a series of works critiquing the minimalist and abstract works Kelly and other artists made for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. “In the face of one of the worst things that’s ever happened, art is represented as having nothing to say,” Horowitz explained when he showed the works at Sadie Coles in 2011.
Pink Curve (2010), above, paraphrases Kelly’s white Memorial (1992), transforming it into a reference to the pink triangle nazis forced gay people to wear in the concentration camps. Pink Curve called out the invisibility or omission of gay identity, not just in discussion of the Holocaust, but in a work by a gay artist. It’s similar to Horowitz’s critique of Jasper Johns—and/or of the discourse around his work—in works like Rainbow Flags For Jasper In The Style of The Artist’s Boyfriend (2011). [The artist’s boyfriend referenced here is Horowitz’s, Rob Pruitt—unless Johns was keeping a glitter-loving twink under wraps on his farm, obv.] And all that makes sense.
But also.
This morning I saw these photos, and is that not an Ellsworth Kelly pink triangle painting on the living room wall of a 1979 apartment in Olympic Tower, designed by Francisco Kripacz? Yes, yes it is.
Well, technically, it’s not a triangle, but a triangle with asymmetrically truncated corners, so a pentagon, but still, it is rather trianglish. And technically, the architect, resident, and Kripacz’ partner, Arthur Erickson, called it “a very beautiful mauve” Kelly whose form is echoed by the custom steel coffee table [an actual triangle.]
Maybe they bought in bulk, because they used an identically shaped green Kelly outside the Toronto boardroom of the Teck Mining Group.
Erickson and Kripacz were the most famous Canadian Design Gays of the 1970s and 80s. They renovated an iconic party house on Fire Island with a retractable roof and fence. They partied and schmoozed with all sorts of famous and powerful people. Gay architect and nazi Philip Johnson had dinner in the presence of the Kelly pink triangle. They kept working together after they broke up, with Kripacz setting up shop in Beverly Hills. And while I can’t find any party pics, I’m sure Dynasty producer Douglas Cramer had to know about Erickson & Kripacz’s pink Kelly triangle when he bought the Cor-Ten steel version in 1984. So maybe Horowitz was onto something.