The Boston Panels

Ellsworth Kelly’s art relies on carefully balanced color, form, and scale. His vibrant panels for the federal courthouse in Boston act as chromatic beacons that draw visitors through a series of dramatic architectural spaces. The twenty-one panels are installed in seven separate areas of the courthouse, but they function as a single artwork. The spare and ordered geometry of these monochrome panels serves as a foil to the more complicated forms of the Boston skyline that are visible through the courthouse’s enormous glass curtain wall. 

Architectural engagement is an important aspect of The Boston Panels. From the earliest years of his career, in the late 1940s and early '50s, Kelly explored the relationships between painting and architecture. The Boston Panels harkens back to Kelly’s early collages Eight Color Pairs (1951) and the series Nine Colors on White (1953 and 1954). These and other paper collages were conceived by Kelly as studies for architecturally scaled projects. The courthouse in Boston provided him with an opportunity to realize these ideas on a grand scale. Kelly worked closely with Harry Cobb, the project’s lead design architect.

Kelly's brilliantly colored panels are not narrative or symbolic. Instead, they isolate and distill fragments of visual experience. Many of the artist's abstract paintings and sculptures are based on his sketches and collages of observed forms, like shadow patterns on a staircase, a row of shop awnings, or a flattened paper cup. The series of small paper collages titled Nine Colors on White that inspired The Boston Panels was based on sketches and photographs that Kelly made in the 1950s of nine windows on the side of a building along the harbor in Sanary-sur-Mer, in the south of France. Four decades later, Kelly adapted this same composition for the walls of the harborfront courthouse in Boston. 

The results of Kelly's process of abstraction are intense concentrations of color and form that foster a heightened awareness of our visual environment. Courthouse visitors can glimpse fragments of The Boston Panels while walking through the building, as the curved lines of the architecture crop views of the panels into irregular forms. About his work in general, Kelly once stated: “What I’ve tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing."