Ellsworth Kelly in artist quotes on Hard Edge painting & life - free resource, American art history

Ellsworth Kelly in quotes - the American artist on flat painting, ‘Hard Edge’ art & his life in Paris and the United States - free resource for students, pupils, art-lovers and teachers in American art history

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Kelly’s artist quotes describe his concept of ‘flat painting’ and his strong focus on form. In some quotes Kelly refers to his early stay in Paris and his important meeting there with the famous artist Jean Arp and his wife Sofia Tauber. The two had a great impact on Kelly as starting painter; then he stopped representational art. Also Paris itself inspired Kelly for his sketches he made there in the late 1940’s / early 1950’s.

Kelly became famous for his own concept of ‘Hard Edge’ (extreme flat paintings) and ‘Shaped forms’ (irregular forms of the canvas), build up in just basic forms and colors. It was the American art-critic Greenberg who favored and admired Kelly’s abstract painting art for its extreme flatness of the paint on the canvas-surface. It was a painterly position which would Kelly never leave in his life in the United States.
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Some selected artist-quotes of American artist Ellsworth Kelly - as a short introduction of his extended quotes in the PDF:

• ’I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures – they should be the wall (itself!) – even better – on the outside wall – of large buildings… …It should meet the eye direct.’ - Kelly’s quote - his remark to American composer John Cage, 1950; as cited in ‘Ellsworth Kelly, a Retrospective’, ed. Diane Waldman, p. 11

• ’I’m interested in the mass and color, the black and the white, the edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be.’ - quote of Kelly, early 1960’s; as cited in: ‘Ellsworth Kelly, a Retrospective’, p. 11

• ’I felt that everything is beautiful, but not that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.’ - quote from ‘Notes from 1969’, Ellsworth Kelly
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  selection of free art-resources on American artist Ellsworth Kelly:

  • biographical notes on Ellsworth Kelly, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth_Kelly
  • artist-quotes of ànd about Kelly, Wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ellsworth_Kelly
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    editor: Fons Heijnsbroek / Matrozenhof (FotoDutch on Wikiquote):<br>[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/User:FotoDutch]