Ever since he left New York City in 1970 for fear that his social life was impinging on his creativity, the artist Ellsworth Kelly has lived and worked in Spencertown, New York, in an austere complex of buildings. His studio, designed by the architect Richard Gluckman, and home are refined, understated, and pared down to the essentials—much like Kelly himself. “I have a good sense of scale,” he told me on the bright day I visited, playfully showing off his new oat-colored Margiela sweater as he ushered me through his studio, an expansive series of large white-walled rooms, some with skylights, some with views of the rolling landscape outside. “I know how not to go too far or how not to go too small. I’m doing a sculpture now, a rather big one—and it’s really waiting and waiting. I sometimes don’t try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction—and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, ‘Oh my God—that’s it!’ ”
At 89, and feeling the pressure of time, Kelly seems preoccupied with producing his most refined work yet. In the past year alone he has juggled multiple commissions—among them the facade of Matthew Marks’s recently opened gallery in Los Angeles, an exhibition of new paintings, and several traveling shows—while continuing to paint regularly in his studio. The day I dropped by, he was out of fresh canvases because his assistants had been in Europe helping to move a show of Kelly’s black and white paintings from the Haus der Kunst in Munich to the Museum Wiesbaden. Kelly led me to a room deep within the studio, a kind of mission control. On long tables were models of museum galleries thousands of miles away, and covering the walls was his correspondence with museums, curators, and collectors from around the globe. A poet of the monochrome, Kelly has, over the past seven decades, produced paintings, drawings, and sculptures notable for their purity, containment, and graceful perfection. A show of the deftly rendered plant drawings long central to his work is now on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it will remain until September. (This past April, the Barnes Foundation installed Kelly’s recent 40-foot-tall sculpture The Barnes Totem in the garden of its brand-new building in Philadelphia.)
As much as Kelly’s forms are abstracted, there is always something familiar in them: a continuous, ever evolving exploration of color, line, and form. So much so, in fact, that they can sometimes appear simpler than they are. “The building out here looks like it’s a black bar on top of white—as in, What’s the big deal?” Kelly’s dealer Matthew Marks remarked to me of the facade Kelly created for his Los Angeles gallery. “He’s the great formalist of our time,” said Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “No other artist has pursued color and form as relentlessly and purely as Ellsworth.” As a young art historian at Williams College in the eighties, Govan was charged with installing a gallery of Assyrian reliefs and called Kelly one day to ask if he would contribute one of his sculptures. Kelly, who lived nearby, agreed. “I was looking at these thousands-of-years-old sculptures, and there was Ellsworth Kelly’s simple form—and they stood up to each other perfectly,” Govan recalled. “I didn’t know what I was more impressed by—that Ellsworth Kelly could live up to the standards of ancient art or that the ancient art still seemed current.”
