Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly arrives at LACMA’s gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum on February 9, 2008, in Los Angeles
Born	(1923-05-31)May 31, 1923 Newburgh, New York, U.S.
Died	December 27, 2015(2015-12-27) (aged 92) Spencertown, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Pratt Institute École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Known for	Painting, sculpture, printmaking
Awards	Praemium Imperiale

Ellsworth Kelly (May 31, 1923 – December 27, 2015) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing simplicity of form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.

Kelly was born the second son of three to Allan Howe Kelly and Florence Bithens Kelly in Newburgh, New York, approximately 60 miles north of New York City. His father was an insurance company executive of Scots-Irish and German descent. His mother was a former schoolteacher of Welsh and Pennsylvania-German stock. His family moved from Newburgh to Oradell, New Jersey, a town of nearly 7,500 people. His family lived near the Oradell Reservoir, where his paternal grandmother introduced him to ornithology when he was eight or nine years old.

There he developed his passion for form and color. John James Audubon had a particularly strong influence on Kelly's work throughout his career. Author Eugene Goossen speculated that the two- and three-color paintings (such as Three Panels: Red Yellow Blue, I 1963) for which Kelly is so well-known can be traced to his bird watching and his study of the two- and three-color birds he saw so frequently at an early age. Kelly has said he was often alone as a young boy and became somewhat of a "loner". He had a slight stutter that persisted into his teenage years.

Kelly attended public school, where art classes stressed materials and sought to develop the "artistic imagination". This curriculum was typical of the broader trend in schooling that had emerged from the Progressive education theories promulgated by the Columbia University's Teacher's College, at which the American modernist painter Arthur Wesley Dow had taught. Although his parents were reluctant to support Kelly's art training, a school teacher encouraged him to go further. As his parents would pay only for technical training, Kelly studied first at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which he attended from 1941 until he was inducted into the Army on New Year’s Day 1943.