Ellsworth Kelly

Following two years of study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Kelly served in the U.S. Army during World War II (from 1943 to 1945), and then resumed his schooling at the Boston Museum School (now the School of the Museum of Fine Arts).  He graduated in 1948, and then headed to Paris under the G.I. Bill. While in France, Kelly’s encounters with leading artists of the day proved more profoundly instructive than his formal classes at the École des Beaux-Arts.  Exposure to the urban fabric of Paris was a powerful influence for Kelly, as well.  The first solo exhibition of his work was shown at Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951.  In 1954, Kelly moved to New York, where his first American solo show was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956.  Soon after, Kelly was included in two important exhibitions: Young America 1957 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (the first museum to purchase Kelly’s work) and Sixteen Americans (with Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and others) at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959.

Today, Kelly’s art is exhibited in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, and he has completed many important public commissions.  These include Sculpture for a Large Wall (1957) for the now-demolished Philadelphia Transportation Building (the sculpture was given to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1999) and Berlin Panels (2000) for the Paul-Löbe-Haus, the offices of the German Parliament in Berlin.  A major retrospective exhibition of Kelly’s work was shown in 1996 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich.  Amid a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, The Boston Panels stands out as one of Kelly’s most ambitious projects.