I forget what a delight it is to read Ellsworth Kelly’s catalogue raisonné, especially the first volume, which covers Kelly’s years in Paris. As Yve-Alain Bois, who’s writing the CR, has noted frequently, Kelly was exploring and discovering and inventing so many things that would become the focus of his decades-long career. Between this generative importance and Kelly’s own exhaustive archiving, Bois wrote an essay filled with new insights and historical detail for basically every painting.
I’d forgotten all this when I saw @albemuth post his photo of Seaweed, the largest painting Kelly made during his 1949 stay on Belle-ÃŽle, off the Atlantic coast near Nantes. It’s one of several fascinating, mostly white paintings from the moment, that toggle between the seemingly abstract and the diagrammatic, including two favorites, Toilette and Kilometer Marker, which were both in the EK100 show at Glenstone in 2023.
And I’d completely forgotten that these white works especially were part of Kelly’s grappling with Picasso, whose spindly, spiky linear postwar paintings loomed over Kelly’s sojourn in Paris. Kelly threaded a path between Picasso’s distorted visions and the world as he—Kelly—saw and found it, and then spent seventy+ fruitful years making art in that reality.
Beginning, in important ways, with Seaweed, which Yve-Alain identifies as the first example of Kelly faithfully recording a flat compositional source onto a flat canvas, a crucial non-compositional strategy he—Bois—calls transfer. Kelly splayed the tendrils of a piece of seaweed found on the beach and pinned to the wall of the one-room shack he’d rented on Belle-ÃŽle, and then he painted it, and then erased [sic] extraneous parts with white overpainting to complete the picture. And it’s somehow those palimpsests, like shadows, that give Seaweed a vibrational presence. And then there’s that pin, which now looks like the head of some winged creature. But that’s probably just me.
And I’d not forgotten this other fascinating painting from Belle-ÃŽle, but really had never clocked it all. Monstrance‘s title refers to the sunburst-shaped stand that holds the consecrated eucharist in a Catholic liturgy. But reading Yve-Alain’s entry for the work, the motif turns out to be based on a sundial-like construction on the facade of a building next to the church on Belle-ÃŽle. Tracing the iterations and adaptations through Kelly’s sketches and notes, Bois shows how Kelly processed seeing Picasso’s The Kitchen in Paris, and fused multiple references—to a sun-shaped monstrance he sketched in a Paris museum and to the sundial in front of him—into a single painting.
And so I’d completely forgotten this Monstrance was connected the other window in Austin, Kelly’s chapel at The Blanton. And I did not realize Kelly left the painting to The Blanton after his death. Which now makes me want to see a stained glass version of Seaweed, tbh.