AN INTENSE DETACHMENT:

ELLSWORTH KELLY'S LINE FORM COLOR

HARRY COOPER

Harvard University Art Museums

 AN INTENSE DETACHMENT:
ELLSWORTH KELLY'S LINE FORM COLOR

HARRY COOPER

Harvard University Art Museums

 An Intense Detachment: Ellsworth Kelly's Line Form Color

Harry Cooper

Don't read. Get paper, rods, blocks.

Set them out, paint them, build.
El Lissitzky, Of Two Squares, 1920

In 1949, Ellsworth Kelly was a twenty-six-year-old expatriate studying in Paris on the GI Bill,
but spending more time scouring the city's streets and museums than going to classes.
One find : an old picture postcard. Kelly bought it from a bookseller along the Seine and
then defaced it (fig. 1). Imperfectly mixing brown paint with black and yellow, he covered
the image, whatever it was, with slightly unkempt horizontal and vertical strokes. On the
reverse, instead of a legible message he inscribed an ink doodle that begins and ends in a
witty, abstract impression of salutation and signature, with simpler, speedier lines of "text"
in between. This scrawl is the very opposite of the elegant script that was present on the
card above the address space when Kelly found it, and which he did not alter. Its single
sentence reads "Devine quite l'envoie?" or "Guess who's sending this to you?" (There is a
pun, which makes better sense of the question mark-"[ls it] Devine who's sending this to
you?"-but Kelly is not Marcel Duchamp, not a master of wordplay, and it did not occur to
 ~ ·,_ff)

~ =;l~,.~'
r
~~;; ~ ~ --- - ~
~ 0 ~ . •,.,.,,, --~.

him.) On 12 December 1949, Kelly sent the riddle to his friend Ralph Coburn in the south of
France, who probably had no trouble solving it.
There are several things to say about this modest object. To begin with, Kelly
considers the front of the postcard his first monochrome (or single color) work,' the
earliest appearance of a monochromania that is still raging. Second, this seems to be
Kelly's first treated postcard, which soon became a minor genre for him. The use of
chanced-upon objects had preoccupied Kelly during the course of 1949, but this is the
first time he physically incorporated the object into the work of art. Third, the postcard
contains the first real example of Kelly's use of automatic drawing, a surrealist technique
in which the artist tries to free his hand from all conscious control. Kelly had already
courted an element of free doodling in such drawings as Seaweed (1949), but on the
back of the postcard there is no motif at all, only the vague suggestion of a script. A flood
of automatic drawings followed in 1950, both freehand and assisted by ruler or glue,
both purely abstract and inspired by some object: a coat hanger, a shelled bunker.
Finally, the back of the postcard literalizes what Kelly had just identified as a general goal
for his art - "to eliminate a personal signature," 2
to achieve anonymity - although the
anonymity of the card vis a vis the addressee is pretend. This is significant: what interests

Ill
Kelly is the look of anonymity , not anonym ity itself.
The monochrome, chance and the found object, automaticity, anonymity - these
continued to preoccupy Kelly during his years in France (1948 - 54) and beyond . That they
all came together so early on the two sides of this postcard gives it an importance out of all
proportion to its modesty. Indeed, it may be the smallest, most private, most innocent
(ingenuous, and probably unintended) manifesto in the history of modern art . This is
entirely appropriate for an artist who has never been comfortable with words; who (to
adapt the terms Freud used to distinguish unconscious from conscious modes of thinking)
prefers the "primary process" of line and color to the "secondary process" of word and
image. The postcard as much as says, "Where words were, lines shall be." And "where a
picture was, color shall be."
These two substitutions lead us directly into the curious work called Line Form Color
that Kelly created two years later - "a book," as he put it, "having no written word." 3
8ut
before leaving the postcard behind, a note about Duchamp, who offers an instructive
contrast to Kelly. Even without the pun on Devine, the temptation to think of Duchamp is
great, for the postcard is what Duchamp would have called an "assisted ready-made," a
found and altered object, and it is not Kelly's last, or strictest, ready-made: several
monochrome pages of Line Form Color consist of nothing but sheets of paper that were
already colored and gummed when he bought them; and then there is the remarkable
Study for "Curve I" (1968), a crushed paper cup. But these are exceptional. Kelly's usual
practice in France was to employ a found object not as the work itself, but as a motif to be
copied or otherwise transferred (indexed, to introduce a useful term from semiotics: an
index is a sign that is physically caused by its referent, like a shadow or footprint), for Kelly
"always insists on the fabricated aspect of his work."•
Thus, Kelly's quest for what might paradoxically be called an anonymous style is

5
distinct from Duchamp's myriad evasions of authorship. Kelly does not share Duchamp's
desire to upset the category "work of art" by uncoupling "art" from "work." Rather, his
ambition is much closer to that of Duchamp's greatest detractor, the critic Clement
Greenberg, who yearned in 1949 (lamenting its absence in the new American art) for "a
bland, large, balanced, Apollonian art in which passion does not fill in the gaps left by the
faulty or omitted application of theory but takes off from where the most advanced theory
stops, and in which an intense detachment informs all." 5

By 1955, Greenberg had found what he was looking for in America, praising Barnett
Newman's "calmly and evenly burning canvases." But he found Kelly's equally
6
unmodulated expanses of color "a little too easy to enjoy ." Of course, these are judgments
of taste, and one person's intense detachment is another person's detachment, period. Still,
it is ironic that Greenberg did not "get" Kelly, since Kelly seems to have intuitively realized
(even without being aware of abstract expressionism when he moved to Paris in October
1948) what Greenberg pub l icly declared (from the sanctuary of a British journal): that
immediate-postwar America was inhospitable to a measured, Apollonian art. Kelly went
on to produce work for which Greenberg's words seem perfectly suited: intensely
detached, calmly and evenly burning. But detached from what? This admittedly obtuse
question will be our guide through Line Form Color.

In November 1951, Kelly applied for a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation in New York "to create a book which will be an alphabet of plastic pictorial
elements," as he explained in the application statement (published here for the first time:
see "Project for a Book: Line, Form and Color," in the accompanying volume.) Kelly was
already "planning a book, perhaps a magazine, with no writing whatsoever," as he wrote
to Coburn on 28 May (note again his insistence on the absence of words), and that

6
•
summer he completed the project's forty-six pages, both collages and ink drawings. Along
with his application, Kelly sent twenty-six photographs (not of Line Form Color) and had
his recent painting La Combe Ill (1951) transported to the committee from his alma mater,
the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it was on display. Among his
eight references, Kelly listed Jean Arp, Michel Seuphor, and Georges Vantongerloo, all of
whom he had met in 1950; John Cage, whom he had met in June 1949; and Frank Lloyd
Wright, whom he had never met. 7
Kelly learned in April 1952 that he had been turned down. By his own account, he
put away the project and did not think about it again for years . The pages were not
shown together until Kelly's 1996 Guggenheim retrospective, for which he selected forty
of the original forty -six. That selection and ordering is the basis of the present book,
which is not a facsimile reproduction of the original pages - they were never meant as
more than maquettes - nor even an attempt by Kelly to make the book he would have
made then, but rather his present-day realization of an abandoned project. Thus the two -
and-a-half inch margin or gutter that Kelly reserved at the left of most of the originals (to
accommodate what he imagined would be a thick binding) is now part of the image: Kelly
likes it that way. 8
This is not to say that Kelly forgot entirely about Line Form Color in the years
between 1952 and 1996. His four -part painting Green Red Yellow Blue (1965) - a key
painting, since it signals Kelly's adoption of the monochrome panel as his primary means
from then on - repeats the four hues he selected for monochrome treatment in the
maquettes, thus commemorating the most stunning gesture of the book, pointing our
attention to it in retrospect. These four sheets-"Red," "Green," "Yellow," and "Blue" -
have a better claim to be Kelly's first monochromes than the postcard (which really has
three not-quite -blended colors). Or do they? What place do these four pages - and, for

7
that matter, Line Form Color as a whole - have in Kelly's work?
To claim these four pages as the source of Kelly's "panels" - his preferred term for the
stretched and painted monochrome canvas - is too simple. It is entirely different to
instantiate the monochrome in the didactic format of a book (or the epistolary format of a
postcard for that matter) than on a canvas, where its only function is to be art. The "panel"
first appears in Kelly's seminal Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1949) (fig. 2), but
does not stand on its own: it is set into a painted wooden structure replicating the window
of the title. It next appears in Colors for a Large Wall (1951) (fig. 3), an equally important
painting consisting of a square grid of sixty-four contiguous panels. While both of these
works contain monochromes, they are not monochromes. Tableau Vert (1952), inspired by
Kelly's visit to Monet's gardens at Giverny, is a single canvas, but it can only be called a
monochrome if, as with the postcard, we ignore the subtle variety of its hues. The four
panels of Green Red Yellow Blue (1965) are separated on the wall, but they constitute a ·
single work of fixed dimensions . Yellow Piece (1966) is, at last, a single color on a single,
autonomous canvas, but the canvas is aggressively shaped, rounded at two opposite
corners, which strongly activates the white wall as its ground, producing a virtual
bichrome: yellow and white.

8
•

As this quick search proves, the monochrome is an elusive presence in Kel ly's work, at
once everywhere and nowhere . This in turn indicates that the monochrome is a means for
Kelly, not an end in itself . Line Form Color had a crucial role in establishing that means, but
the path from its monochromes (summer 1951) to Colors for a Large Wall (November 1951)
and beyond is, we shall see, not a straight line.
But first , before we trace that crooked line, what about other possible links between
Line Form Color and Kelly's oeuvre? There are several pages (in addition to the four
monochromes just mentioned) that strongly anticipate later works . Kelly surely retrieved
the color juxtaposition of the "Pink and Orange" collage fo r Painting for a White Wall
(1952) (fig. 4) : the color combination is too radical for its repe t ition to be a coincidence.
Train Landscape (1952- 53) is based on the structure, though not the color, of "Red, Yellow,
Blue" and "Red, Blue, Yellow." Kelly himself suggests, more generally, that Line Form
Color led to "later advances of the curved form into cutouts and reliefs, and ultimately into
freestanding sculpture ." Rebound
9
(1959), for example, owes much to the "White on
White" collage, and White Curve on White (1955), as its title suggests, derives equally
from that collage and from the "Curve Line" drawing; but other curving "descendants"
of Line Form Color, such as the aluminum relief Blue on Blue (1963), are more distant.

9
 Line Form Color also relates to Kelly's immediately preceding work. His method of
taking a drawing, cutting it up into squares, and randomly rearranging them, which
produced the paintings Cite (fig . 5), Meschers, Talmont, and Gironde (all spring 1951), is
clearly reflected in the collage "Black, Brown, White" as well as in "Pink and Orange." 10
But
these are two exceptional pages. What about the rest of the book? Clare Bell reads "the
inked lines, grids, and bands" at the beginning of the book as "light patterns reconstituted
and emptied of all modu lations," linking them to Kelly's use of cast shadows in the La
Combe series of 1950-51. 11
Jack Cowart argues in similar fashion that the "Grid Lines"
drawing "sets the fundamental scheme for a subsequent series of drawings that would ...
be used to present the artist's observations of light reflected off water"-the Seine works
(1951), which combine order and randomness to produce a filtered impression. 12
But these
interpretations are a stretch, given the very general significance and potential of any grid
or set of lines. It would be equally strained to compare "Grid Lines" to Kelly's 1951
Bathroom Tiles, a quasi-indexical collage : despite the superficial resemb lance, the drawing
has none of t h e colo r istic subtlety of the collage, which exactly reproduces slight
differences in tile color. In short, it is hard to find much evidence of the index or the use of
chance in Line Form Color. The work is largely an aberration in Kelly's oeuvre up to that
point and should be acknowledged as such, our desire for art-historical continuity
notwithstanding.
This, then, is the first detachment of Line Form Color : from Kelly's contemporaneous
oeuvre . As Yve-Alain Bois notes:
Kelly was momentarily tempted by the notion of a "systematic" art, and by all
the illusions concerning the "universal" character of its formal language t hat go
with it (in a way, the book he had proposed for a Guggenheim fellowship ... was
not far from the approach of a [Max] Bill or a [Richard Paul] Lohse in that it

10
 sought to demonstrate the possibility of a basic geometric alphabet, capable of
providing material for all sorts of combinations) .13
But Bois's conclus ion - "the book was never published, no doubt never even finished,
since, in working on it, the artist had realized the inanity of the enterprise"-goes too far. 14
For one thing, the book in its model stage was finished, or at least ended, as I will
argue, and Kelly lavished a great deal of attention on its well -crafted pages. For another
thing, it is far from clear that Kelly's "ente rprise" was (more than ostensibly) to c reate a
universa l language. In the statement he submitted with the application, Kelly does call Line
Form Color "an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements." But does he really believe it to be
much more than a personal one? Kelly commends the ambition "to state an absolute
15
truth," but he also allows that "the personality of the creator" is p resent in all art . The
collages and drawings themselves seem at ease with a fair degree of the personal and
contingent. The book hardly makes the case, for example, that the narrow "Mandorla Form"
(which Kelly discovered in a church in Poitiers and used as the basis for a 1949 painting) is
as elemental as the triangle, square, and circle that precede and follow it, for it is neither
linked to its more stable neighbors via intermediate forms nor integrated into later, more
complex arrangements in the book. The idea of a logical progression within the three
divisions of the book (line, form, and color) is raised, certainly, but only to be dismissed at
every turn. "Nine Colors" does not pretend to arise from the preceding pages in hue or
form. And why are there "Vertical Lines" but no "Horizontal Lines"? The system collapses
almost as soon as it is set up . So, if Kelly himself realizes the "inanity" of the modernist
enterprise, the impossibility of creating a universally comprehensible visual language (and I
agree with Bois that he does), he does so in the first pages - and keeps going.
This is the second detachment of Line Form Color: from its modernist predecessors like
Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane or Mondrian's General Principles of Neo-Plasticism,

11
both of 1926, to mention only two. Kelly's book is, if not a satire, at least a deflation of
Bauhaus, Constructivist, and De Stijl claims to a universal, absolute, self-evident visual
language. But that leaves Kelly with a problem. If the visual language of Line Form Color is
largely personal, a checking account of forms and ideas to be drawn on (or not) later, how
then will it "speak to people anonymously," as Kelly hopes in his statement? How will it
advance the desire for "paintings/objects, unsigned, anonymous" that Kelly had conceived
in the wake of his Window, Museum of Modern Art , Paris (1949)? In that work, a distilled
but painstaking reproduction of its banal motif "exactly as it was, with nothing added,"
Kelly found the freedom of anonymity. 16
This led directly to a variety of quasi -indexical
works in which Kelly carefully reproduced the lines on maps or the flat patterns-often
indexical to begin with - made by shadows, stains, torn wallpaper, etc. But for one reason
or another, in making Line Form Co/or-whether to appear conservative to the grant
committee or because the format of a book encouraged the multiplication of internal rather
than external relations - Kelly deprived himself of the strategy of the index.
With this detachment from the referent - and here is the third detachment of Line
Form Co/or-Kelly finds himself in the realm of total abstraction, cut loose even from the
disguised sources of his indexical works. His discomfort with this territory is signaled by
the striking absence of the word "abstraction" from his statement. The problem,
sharpened by Kelly's desire to avoid subjective compositional choice, is how to "motivate"
abstraction (in the semiotic sense: a motivated sign is one in which the relation between
signifier and signified is not arbitrary) - how to give painting a compelling, objective logic
or pu rpose in the absence of a motif. Kelly had tried one solution that spring (1951) when
he replaced compositional decisions with a strategy that combined chance and structure.
(These are the cut -up and rearranged works already mentioned, from which paintings like
Cite derived.) But Line Form Color has no more use for this strategy than for the index. Nor

12
 6 7

does it adopt either pure randomness or pure structure alone. Kelly flirts with the latter in
the "Diagonal Lines" drawing (fig. 6), whose two crossed lines extend from the corners
of the page (minus the gutter), producing a so -called deductive structure - an image
derived directly from the shape of its field. But the idea is dismissed in "Curve Line" (fig.
7), which cuts its own sweet path across the page. From then on in the book, the most
Kelly does is to maintain a left-right symmetry in his placement of the image, and even
this is inconsistent. Kelly's insistence on the use of a wide left-hand margin and his
refusal to indicate that margin clearly or consistently - resulting in an uncertain
delineation of the pictorial field, a "soft" edge - seems designed to defeat any deductive
structure in advance.
But there is another, looser kind of motivation essayed by Line Form Color, one that
Kelly insists on in every paragraph of his application statement: a "return to the wall," a
"relation to the architectural wall." What this presupposes - and here is the fourth
detachment of Line Form Color - is the dismounting of painting from the easel, indeed from
the gallery or museum wall (from being "hung on walls"). Only then could painting be
reattached to the wall-not the gallery wall but the everyday wall, and not as a temporary
ornament but as an integral element of appropriate form and scale. In other words, the

13
demands of architecture would help define the look of painting; abstract painting would find
a degree of motivation in its immediate, architectural environment, thereby postponing, if
not (of course) answering, the question of its ultimate justification. Kelly's language - "a
closer contact between the artist and the wall" - suggests a fusion or even a happy collision
between artist and wall, destroying "the artist's separate personality."
This classic modernist-utopian idea of a tight collaboration between painting and
architecture, advanced above all by the De Stijl movement (1917- 31), was very much in the
air once again in the late 1940s. According to Bell, "Kelly vividly recalls Herbert Read
visiting the [Boston Museum] school and delivering a lecture in which he declared that
easel painting was no longer a viable option: art and architecture must instead join
together. " 11 Greenberg ambiguously celebrated a "crisis of the easel picture" in the 1948
essay of that name in Partisan Review. An interesting point of contact between Kelly's
statement and Greenberg's essay is their refusal to commit to print the word "mural," the
obvious alternative to "easel," no doubt because of its immediate associations with the
Mexican muralists, the WPA, and Picasso's Guernica. This is a fifth - and, for our purposes,
final - detachment of Line Form Color: from any manifest political agenda. As Kelly's
statement indicates, his ambition for wall painting is political only in the broad sense that
he hopes it will signal the return to a pre-Renaissance integration of art with daily life.
But what could Kelly's little book possibly have to do with a new, architectural role for
painting, as he claims repeatedly in his statement? (The question is only made more urgent
by the experience of visiting a gallery in which the individual works are framed and hung
on the wall.) One answer is that the format of a book adds a temporal, narrative, hence
quasi-architectural dimension to the experience of discrete images. But the narrative of
Line Form Color is too simple to bear that kind of interpretive weight. A better answer has
to do with the word "scale," which appears five times in Kelly's statement. Kelly is using

14
 8 9

the word roughly as a synonym for size, but he is certainly aware of the distinction
between size (absolute dimension) and scale (perceived dimension). Indeed, the restricted
dimensions of a book allowed Kelly to experiment with an expanded scale-with color
areas that fill the avai lable surface and lines that reach clear across it.
This large scale is most evident by far in the four monochromes and the five half-and-
half bichromes-"White and Black," "Black and White," "Red and Yellow," "Blue and Red,"
"Yellow and Blue"-for only in those nine cases can the work in its actual size be
incorporated into an expanded version of itself without changing in the least: it takes no
effort of imaginative recomposition to perform the blow-up, only an extension on all sides .
As a result, when looking at them it is easy to get the dizzying, Alice-in-Wonderland sense
that they (or we) could be any size at all. What these works have is not exactly a large
scale, but a flexible one. To think about it another way, we can easily imagine that what we
see while looking at "Green" or "Blue and Red" (fig. 8), is a fragment of a vaster work of
identical composition, not just a scaled-down version of one. This does not work with
"Red, Blue, Yellow" (fig. 9), for example, because the middle strip will be too narrow if all
we do mentally to increase the size is to extend the composition on all sides. A three-part
composition is significantly more complex than a two-part one, creating relations of

15
internal scale that require some effort of extrapolation to duplicate at a larger size.
The breakthrough of Line Form Color, then, is not as momentous as the invention of
the monochrome (that honor goes to Rodchenko) or the establishment of a greater
dimension for color (Matisse ). It is something more personal to Kelly: the articulation of
color on a larger scale. This is the crooked path I promised to trace earlier: in Line Form
Color, Kelly had to reduce the size of his monochrome field from the earlier Window,
Museum of Modern Art, Paris in order to expand its scale and, ultimately, its size as well. It
was the monochromes and bichromes of Line Form Color that allowed Kelly later that year
to make the important transition from the 1,444 small color squares of the Spectrum works
to the 64 larger color squares of Colors for a Large Wall. Bois has interpreted this transition
as a further step in Kelly's anticompositional campaign, since the expanded size and
reduced number of units (which equals a greatly expanded scale) "diminishes the
possibilities of internal chromatic relations" and hence "of the forming of relations
between colors, of pairs and triads being constituted ... 'figures' emerging." 18For Bois, this
development was sealed by Painting for a White Wall (1952), which earned the following
reaction, reported by Kelly: "A child, pointing with his finger said: 'black-rose-orange -
white - blue - blue-white - orange - rose-black . "19 This reaction, Bois argues, by
presenting Kelly with the specter of his own extreme coloristic nominalism, precipitated a
retreat to composition in subsequent works. But that is another story.
Let us stay for a moment with the child's reaction, for it can help us interpret the
project of Line Form Color. So far we are facing (aside from the matter of scale, which is
still on the table, since we have yet to specify its full effects) the dreary possibility that the
book is merely a deflation of modernist hopes for a universal language. If it goes farther, it
is only to assert a strictly private language, a prospect at odds with Kelly's stated goals. But
there is another possibility: that what the book articulates is language neither universal nor

16
private, but simply a language, as arbitrary and conventional and shared as our spoken
one. The child's reaction of naming and pointing in front of Painting for a White Wall would
be an entirely appropriate reaction to Line Form Color too: indeed, simple naming is
exactly what the titles of the individual pages, added by Kelly much later, do. The book is
not about the interaction of colors (Kelly has confirmed his lack of interest in the influential
color theories of Josef Albers) for there is no control, nothing is held constant, no system
obtains - as it does, by contrast, in Kelly's Suite of 27 Color Lithographs (1964 - 65) . Rather,
Line Form Color is about the enunciation of colors-not essential or basic colors (for where
are the monochromes of orange and purple, those essential secondaries?), but just colors,
and not by name (although this is unavoidable), but as such, ostensively: an ostensive
definition is a definition by pointing, without words. These are colors Kelly likes, his dialect,
or rather idiolect: "the language or speech pattern of one individual at a particular period
of his life. " 20
But they are also colors that everyone, even a child, knows and uses. Kelly's
ambition, perhaps like that of every artist, is to impose and disseminate his idiolect, to
make it the talk of the town - and where better to begin than in the schoolroom?
This brings us to a context for Line Form Color that has not been discussed before,
but which Kelly himself points to with great emphasis: his teaching at the American School
in Paris du ring the 1950 - 51 school year. Children were very much on Kelly's mind during
that time. His collage ideas were stimulated by the need to come up with weekly cut-and -
paste exercises, and indeed the materials he used were the gummed, colored papers in
every French schoolchild's satchel, with their wonderful array of odd hues and their
demiglazed, slightly bumpy surfaces. The painting La Combe IV-Collaboration with a
Twelve-Year-Old Girl (1951) is based on a watercolor by one of his students that Kelly has
preserved to this day. Kelly says that he saw the composition of Cite in a dream in which
he was "wo rking on a scaffold with a lot of children, creating an immense mural composed

17
 10 11

of square panels on which we painted black bands with huge brushes ." 2 1 This dream of
children as worker -artists is of a piece with the particular anti-individualism of Kelly's Line
Form Color statement, for children do not make a cult of personality. They don't have to:
their egos are encompassing; they are sovereign creator-destroyers. Intense detachment is
not a bad description of their art-making, which combines burning attention with careless
disposal in a manner that is often disturbing to adults.
Kelly views Line Form Color as, among other things, a children's book (a far cry from
the sober purpose of a Kandinsky or Mondrian), and indeed it may be a kind of dedication
to the students he had just lost, having been dismissed from his teaching job after the
principal of the American School saw his exhibition at the Galerie Arnaud in the spring of
1951 . Like Lissitzky's Of Two Squares, another book for ages three to adult (as the cover
might say), Line Form Color tells a simple story. It has two movements of equal length,
just like the two halves of an art-school foundation course: first black and white, in twenty
pages (roughly half devoted to line, half to form); then color, another twenty pages. But
the end (the last two collages, "White on White" and "Black on Black," figs. 10-11) is
something of a surprise: a return to black and white, now separate and equal, as if the
work with color has allowed the realization that black and white are colors in themselves ,

18
not simply opposite terms that together define line and form. (The surprise is nicely
foreshadowed by "Black" and "White," which end the first half of Line Form Color.) That
this realization comes out of the color work is signaled by the fact that "White on White"
has the same structure as "Green Curves," which immediately precedes it. And, in a nice
reverse movement, Kelly takes the in-between shape removed from "White on White"
and places it on green paper to define the two forms of "Green Curves." 22
The result is a
neatly tied-up ending that does much to make up in narrative structure for what the book
lacks in logical system.
Kelly's concern to make a tidy ending-which does not seem to have bothered
Lissitzky, whose parting text is "This is the end: let's go on" - betrays his sensitivity to the
problems of narrative. Kelly relies on the old trick of returning to the beginning without
simply returning, which Hegel dignified with the name "sublation" - here, the sublation .of
black and white, canceled but restored, elevated, as color. And that's not all: Kelly does it
in the form of a couplet, which immediately calls to mind the end of a Shakespearean
sonnet, those two rhyming lines "ideally suited for producing a summary statement or
witty twist after the problem has been turned about in the three quatrains." 23
There is a
movement within Kelly's couplet, too, from the open, outreaching arms of "White on
White" to the closed, definitive form of "Black on Black." And with this finality comes a
return of figuration, since the black oval (in the collage) is not perfect but tapers ever so
slightly toward its bottom, suggesting a head (and in turn making the two preceding
pages, with their play of figure and ground, recall a face-vase illusion) - a "head"
contoured with the stark simplicity that also characterizes Kelly's remarkable, little-known
portrait drawings of the children he was teaching.
Significantly, the representation of nature is never abjured in Kelly's application
statement (read the sixth paragraph closely). So perhaps it is not going too far to read

19
"Black on Black" as a dark face directly confronting the view er, an iconic presence. Well, no
longer a face exactly, for Kelly had worked through his fascination with Cycladic and
Byzantine and Picassoid visages, but an icon nonetheless, a facing wall:
To hel l with pictures - they should be the wall - even better - on the outside
wall-of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billb oards or a kind of modern
icon .... It should meet the eye- direct. 24

Just as Walter Benjamin realized that the cropped, screen -filling close -up in films helps to
transform our experience of space and the body ("With the close-up, space expands; with
slow motion, movement is extended" 25
), so Kelly enlists scale in the creation of a new,
abstract icon. Scale, as we have seen, is not a product of size but of internal relations (or
their absence). This is what distinguishes the 1949 postcard from the monochromes of Line
Form Color . While in both cases the image fills the surface, raising the possibility of a
heroic scale, the visible brushstrokes in the postcard return us to the scale of manipulable
objects. By contrast, the lack of internal articulation in the collages virtually propels us, if
we are a little willing, from the page to the wall to the screen or billboard. This experience
lingers, and allows Kelly at the end of the book to risk a return to composition, to internal
relations, without any diminution of scale.
"Black on Black" is Kelly's retort to his iconoclastic painting -over of the found
postcard. Instead of using the monochrome to suppress the image, he finds an image
within the monochrome. The message of this inversion (if we may give speech to Kelly's
song without words) is clear: once the vocabulary of the monochrome has been fully
internalized; once black and white have been understood as colors; once scale has been
understood as independent of size - once all this has happened, an image, a human
presence even, can again be won . Only the presence is not that of the artist (anathema to
Kelly) but that of the viewer/reader. This last page of the book is reminiscent of Baudelaire's

20
or Whitman's shockingly direct addresses to the reader, but the vernacular has been
updated: your photo here, if you dare (you 'dere!).
And so, with this send -off or envoi, as the closing couplet of a sonnet is called when it
commends itself to its beloved or its reader, Kelly closed the book on Line Form Color, and
then, after he did not get the hoped-for grant, put it away for decades, like a postcard
inscribed but unsent. And yet Line Form Color also has something of Lissitzky's "this is the
end: let's go on," as we have seen. For all its Bauhausy, foundation -course na·ivete, so
exceptional for Kelly - or precisely because of it- the book cut the apron-strings of chance
and the index, and projected Kelly into the spacious, colored monochrome dream that still
beckons him.

21
 Notes
1. Unless otherwise indicated, observations attributed to
Kelly in this essay we re made during conversations in
August and October 1998. My thanks to Ellsworth Kelly for
these discussions; to Yve-A lain Bois, whose ideas about
Kelly's work have shaped my own; and to Sarah Boxer and
Evelyn Rosenthal for carefu l readings of the manuscript.
2. Kelly in conversat ion with Nathalie Brunet, May 1991,
about his Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1949);
cited in Brunet, "Chronology," in Yve-A lain Bois et al.,
Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954, exh . cat.,
National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., 1992), 184.
3. See Kelly, "Project for a Book: Line, Form and Color"
(November 1951), in accompanying volume.
4. As Bois puts it, Kelly uses things "already made" but
does not make "ready-mades"-not only because he
"a lways in sists on the fabr icated aspect of his work" but
also because he does not want "the original referent to
be deducible from the work," which it always is w ith the
ready-made, where the or iginal referent is the work. Bois,
"El lsworth Kelly in France: Anti-Composit ion in Its Many
Guises," in Bois et al., Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in
France, 14, 22. Bois further argues (14-15) that Kelly did
not know about "the Duchampian ready-made" and had
not seen Duchamp's Fresh Widow (1920) when he created
his deceptive ly simil ar Window, Museum of Modern Art,
Paris in October 1949.
5. John O'Brian, ed., Clem ent Greenberg: The Collected
Essays and Criticism (Chicago and London, 1986-93),
2:167. "Bland" should be understood here in the sense
of unperturbed, not dull.
6. Ibid., 3:232; 4:215. It should be added that, although
Greenberg never reviewed Kelly, he did seem to come
22
around, writing in 1967 that the minimalists might learn
from Kelly, Truitt, Caro, and No land "how to rise above
Good Design." (4:256) In any case, we should be wary
of accepting Greenberg as a guide to the monochromatic
impulse , given his mistaken assertion (3:232), which
Newman himself tried to correct, that Newman "soaks
his pigment into the canvas, getting a dyer's effect."
7. The information in this paragraph is derived from Clare
Bell, "At Play with Vision: Ellsworth Kelly's 'Line, Form
and Color,"' in Diane Wa ldm an, ed., Ellsworth Kelly:
A Retrospective, exh . cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum (New York, 1996), 66, 70, 75; Diane Wa ldman,
"E llsworth Kelly," in the same volume, 22-23; and
Brunet, "Chronology," 182-91.
8. Since this essay was necessarily composed before the
present volume was produced, my analysis will refer to
the or iginal works. Except for the issue of the gutter, it
w ill not treat the decisions Kelly made about how to
transform the co llages and drawings into the pages of
a published book. For reproductions of the originals,
see Wa ldman, ed., Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective,
plates 119.1-.40.
9. Waldman, "E llsworth Kelly," 23.
10. Interestingly, the "Pink and Orange" collage has more
in common with the finished paintings than with the
studies for them, since its eight elements are horizontally
continuous, and on ly give the impression of having
been cut vertica lly.
11. Bell, "At Play with Vis ion," 72.
12. Jack Cowart, "Method and Motif : Ellsworth Kelly's
'Chance' Gr ids and His Development of Color Panel
Paintings, 1948-1951," in Bois et al., Ellsworth Kell y:
The Years in France, 42.
13. Bois, "Ellsworth Kelly in France ," 25. Bois goes on to 21. Brunet, "Chronology ," 190.
distinguish this ambition from that of Kelly's eight 22. I am indebted to Jeffrey Inaba for this observation.
Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance collages (1951 ), 23. M.H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English
which "is not just systematic, it is also aleatory." Literature (New York, 1974, 3rd ed.), 1:2473.
14. Ibid., 35, n. 48. 24. Kelly, letter to John Cage, 4 September 1950, cited in
15. The extremity of this phrase, along with the little tirade Brunet, "Chronology," 188.
against mass culture that precedes it in the same 25. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of
sentence, can perhaps be traced to the influence of the Mechanical Reproduction" [1936], in his Illuminations,
ideas of Ma x Beckmann . See Brunet, "Chronology ," 178. ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969),
16. "From then on, painting as I had known it was finished 236. See also Roland Barthes, "The Face of Garbo"
for me. The new works were to be paintings /objects, [1957], in his Mythologies , trans . Annette Lavers
unsigned, anonymous. Everywhere I looked , everything (New York, 1972), 56-57.
I saw became something to be made, and it had to be
made exactly as it was , with nothing added . It was a new
freedom: there was no longer the need to compose ."
Quoted in John Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly (New York,
1971), and cited in Bois, "Ellsworth Kelly in France," 14.
17. Bell, "At Play with Vision," 68.
18. Bois, " Ellsworth Kelly in France, " 26.
19. Kelly, untitled statement in Art Now: New York 1, no . 9
(November 1969), unpaginated; cited in Bois , "Ellsworth
Kelly in France," 28. Bois (36, n. 61) goes on to note :
"The color of the left panel of Painting for a White Wall
is in fact a very dark blue, but this nuance, hard to
perceive even in normal viewing conditions, probably
could not have been grasped from the street ." (Kelly had
hung the picture on his balcony in order to get comments
from passersby.) It should also be noted that, in his
recollection, Kelly does not bother to translate the French
rose . An English-speaking child would have said "pink."
20. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass .,
1981), 563.

23
Line Form Color has been published to accompany Ellsworth Kelly: The Early
Drawings, 1948-1955, an exhibition organized by the Harvard University Art
Museums and Kunstmuseum Winterthur. This book was first conceived by Ellsworth
Kelly in 1951 in a series of drawings and collages, a project he has herewith brought
to completion. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Werner H. Kramarsky.

© 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Published by the Harvard University Art Museums. All rights reserved . No portion
of this publication may be reproduced without written permission.

ISBN: 1-891771-05-1 (paper) ISBN: 1-891771-06-x (cloth)

Distributed worldwide by The University of Chicago Press,

except in continental Europe , distributed by Richter Verlag, DUsseldori.

Editor: Evelyn Rosenthal

Designer: Matsumoto Incorporated, New York, NY
Printer: Heinrich Winterscheidt GmbH, Dllsseldorf

Printed in Germany