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Gagosian Quarterly

Spring 2022 Issue

Ellsworth Kelly

The second volume of the catalogue raisonné of paintings, reliefs, and sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly was released in October 2021. Covering the years 1954 to 1958, the new book was written by Yve-Alain Bois and published by Cahiers d’Art. Here, Bois speaks with Bob Monk about the origins of this ambitious endeavor, as well as its parameters and missions.

Ellsworth Kelly with a brass model for Sculptural Screen in Brass (1957). Photo: Onni Saari

Ellsworth Kelly with a brass model for Sculptural Screen in Brass (1957). Photo: Onni Saari

Yve-Alain Bois

Yve-Alain Bois is a professor of art history in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has curated many exhibitions, including the 1994–95 retrospective of Piet Mondrian in The Hague, Washington, DC, and New York; Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry, at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (1998); Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948–1955, at the Harvard University Art Museums (1999); Ellsworth Kelly: Tablet, at the Drawing Center, New York (2002); and Picasso Harlequin (2008), at the Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome. He is an editor of the journal October.

Bob Monk

Bob Monk has been a director at Gagosian, New York, for over twenty years, working closely with Ed Ruscha and Richard Artschwager. He has curated numerous Gagosian exhibitions, including the multivenue Ed Ruscha: Books & Co., and worked with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on the production of the artwork it commissioned from Artschwager for the museum’s elevator interiors.

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Bob MonkYve-Alain, I can’t tell you how excited I was five years ago when you brought me the first volume of the raisonné. Now we’re here today to speak about the second. How did you first get involved in this project?

Yve-Alain BoisI was asked to write an essay for the catalogue of the exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s French years [1948–54] that was held at the National Gallery of Art in 1993. I also organized exhibitions on Ellsworth, one at the Harvard University Art Museums [1999], of his drawings for the same French years, and one at the Drawing Center, New York [2002], of what he called his Tablet, a set of more than two hundred boards in which he pasted sketches, collages, clippings—something one could compare to Gerhardt Richter’s Atlas. I kept being commissioned to write texts on Ellsworth for various occasions—exhibitions in museums and galleries, special issues of journals—and you know, it seemed to me absurd to continue to do multiple little things when what I really should do was a monograph.

I thought I knew the material well, especially Ellsworth’s early work, because I’d written the texts and I’d organized the exhibitions I mentioned. But I realized that even for those early years there were really a lot of things I didn’t know about the genesis of each particular painting. I realized that to write a monograph covering his entire career I needed to have a precise idea of the whole corpus; I needed to research every single work. And when I started doing that, I thought, Well, what I’m doing is basically a kind of catalogue raisonné for myself. So, if I do it for myself [laughs], why not benefit the whole world, especially with regard to the genesis of the works, the way they evolved, the way they started from one point and sometimes finished in a totally different vision. I decided, Okay, then I’ll do a catalogue raisonné.

BMWhat I was so impressed with, starting with volume one, is that you write a really fantastic, concise introduction and within the introduction you tell me and the other readers where we’re going to go. Then you go into all the scholarship for each and every work. You’ve said that for volume one you actually viewed every work except one?

YABYeah, there was one owner who didn’t want me to see it. And in volume two, it’s about the same, there were about two that I didn’t get to see.

BMThat’s phenomenal. And in many cases you physically inspected both the front and the back.

YABThe thing is, I wouldn’t have been able to do this project if I hadn’t. You gain many things besides pleasure by looking at the real work—you know, all kinds of things, scale, sometimes pentimenti (though that’s rare with Ellsworth), or the way he handles the tacking edges, painting them or not. It’s crucial. I promised Ellsworth that I would do that. This past Friday I schlepped all the way to Sag Harbor from Princeton, a nine-hour roundtrip, just to see one sculpture.

BMAnd was that for volume three?

YABYes. Well, I don’t know where it will fit in exactly, but it’s one of the sculptures that’s not frontal. Most—I mean, 99.9 percent—of Ellsworth’s sculptures are frontal, but this one is one of the type he called Rockers and you really have to move around it to take it in.

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, Pony, 1959, painted aluminum, 31 × 78 × 64 inches (78.7 × 198 × 162.6 cm). Photo: Glenn Halvorson

BMI love the Rockers. Before I read volume one, I had this idea in my mind that there were these parameters that Ellsworth had set up. What I loved about the catalogue is that you make it very clear: no, they were systems. Ellsworth’s work is not about setting parameters; the systems are actually very open. So going through the first and now the second volume, even for someone who knew Ellsworth, it opened my mind to a whole new way of appreciating his work.

Could you speak a little about how you decided to demarcate where one catalogue ended? You did that very naturally.

YABIt’s an interesting case with Ellsworth. The split between volume one and volume two was very natural because he moved back to New York in 1954, and there’s a clear change between what he was doing in Paris and what he started doing in New York. I say “started” because there was a transitional period: in the first two years he hadn’t yet abandoned his Paris strategies, he carried them over for a while, but concurrently he began something entirely new. The first two paintings he makes after his return to the US are based on a completely different aesthetic from the works he had been doing in France, but at the same time, for a while he still made paintings based on collages he had brought back from France, collages he had produced according to what I call his Paris strategies and what you call “systems.”

BMWhat were those Paris strategies?

YABThere are four basic ones: change, transfer, the grid, and the monochrome panel. Those were the four things that he used in Paris as a system for not composing, and as I say, he progressively let go of them. All in all, if you skim over the “transitional” period, you realize that there’s a clear cut between volume one and volume two, which covers the years 1954 to 1958. Later it’s much more complicated because he often returns to earlier periods of his work. He could pick up a collage that he had made in the early 1950s when he arrived in New York and do a painting out of it ten years later, or twenty years, or thirty years. I want to be chronological, but at the same time, it’s complex. I have a rule, which is that in an entry about a work, let’s say from 1955, I’m not going to write about a work from 1985.

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, Black Curves, 1954, oil on linen, 36 × 26 inches (91.4 × 66 cm)

BMIn the introduction to the second volume, you mention this one little disagreement that you had with Ellsworth: he felt that if he did a collage in 1954 and then used it in 1966, he wanted you to mention the 1966 work in the 1954 entry. And what I love about you, you had to be absolutely tough—you said it was an abomination to try to use the word “precursor” retrospectively, but the narrative of inspiration in the opposite direction made sense. So, you write, when you get to the 1966 work you have no problem going back and mentioning all the previous works that informed it.

YABExactly. Because one thing that’s fascinating in Ellsworth’s work is—and I don’t know any other artists who do this—let’s say we’re in 1992 and he finds a wonderful collage that he made in 1965, he looks at it and he says, Why didn’t I make a painting out of it? Most of his paintings came from many little sketches that get more and more refined until they’re made into the final collage, which then is transposed into painting. From the final collage to the painting, there’s no change except the size and the medium. I don’t know any other artist who’s able to look at a work twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years later and do it exactly as he would have done it originally. Ellsworth thought, This particular thing seduced me then and it seduces me now, and I cannot change. And the particular thing can be a sketch he’s made but also something he found in the street and pasted on one of the boards of his Tablet.

BMSo those things in his career always live in the present, in a sense.

YABIn many ways, yes. He said it himself, actually: someone asked him, “Why do you go back to all these old things,?” and he replied, “What do you mean, old things?” [laughs].

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Curves, 1954, oil on linen, 23 ⅝ × 12 ⅝ inches (60 × 32 cm)

BMI’d like to hear more about your amazing story of first reaching out to Ellsworth when you were seventeen years old.

YABI was in America as an exchange student through a program called ICYE, International Christian Youth Exchange. I was sent to high school in the countryside, in Hanover, Pennsylvania. And you know, all I wanted was to go to New York, which was not possible. These people were very, very anxious. They thought New York was Babylon.

BMExactly [laughs].

YABSo my parents had to write and explain, You know, we’ve been letting him go by himself to see the museums and galleries in Paris since he was fourteen and we were living in the South of France, just let him go to the city. It was very complicated and they had to sign all kinds of letters. Anyway, I was in New York for a few days on spring break in February 1970. I’d prepared that trip like two months in advance to make sure I’d see the Museum of Modern Art and this and that, so I’d written to Ellsworth and said, I’m this young French guy, I’m in the countryside, I know you live in New York, could I come and see you in your studio? I told him exactly when I’d be there. And you know, for years I thought he didn’t answer, or that’s the way I remembered it. But he always disagreed.

I ended up first meeting him later at the opening of the Malevich show at the National Gallery [in 1990]. Soon after, I was invited to come to Spencertown, because by that time I’d already agreed to do the essay for the National Gallery show of the French years. It was very jolly; he and Jack were very hospitable. And I started working on the archive a little bit. I was very impressed by what I saw and what I read. At some point I asked Ellsworth, “Why did you never answer the letter I wrote you when I was a kid?” He said, “You wrote me a letter when you were a kid?” “Yeah, I did, but you didn’t answer.” He said, “No, no, no, that’s not possible. A French kid and you were seventeen? Come on, at that time I wasn’t very social, so I would have answered. And if you wrote me, I’m sure I kept the letter.” Ellsworth was kind of obsessive in some ways, and he was a fantastic archivist. He spent hours looking through his papers and he found the damn letter [laughs].

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, Gauloise Blue with Red Curve, 1954, postcard collage, 3 ¼ × 5 ½ inches (8.3 × 14 cm)

BMThat’s amazing.

YABHe gave me a copy, which I lost instantly [laughter]. But I’ve retrieved it since.

I’ve told this story just to point to the fact that he was really an incredible archivist. And just before he died, I did in fact find a postcard in which he’d answered me! He hadn’t understood that I could only be in the city at the exact date I’d told him and asked that I phone him, which wasn’t possible for me, and that’s probably the reason I’d totally forgotten the letter.

BMHe died around the time you completed volume one?

YABHe died a few days after Christmas in 2015; the book was printed in May, though it wasn’t put in circulation until the fall. I really wanted the first volume to be out soon so he could, you know, see the way it was going and approve. And that’s what happened.

BMSo he got to see it.

YABYeah, he spent a lot of time rereading it and he kept asking, “Did you change this?” And I kept saying, which is absolutely true, “I didn’t change anything” [laughs].

BMThe amount and balance of scholarship in these volumes are above and beyond.

YABThere’s something very weird in the practice of writing a catalogue raisonné. First of all, you write a book, right? But it’s not going to be read as a book. It’s not going to be read from A to Z. You just go to one entry. Because you want to know—

BMYou’re looking for something specific.

YABSpecific. It’s not like a novel, you know?

BMNo.

YABYou write a book for nonreaders, basically. Or, you know, it will be eventually read over the centuries, let’s hope there will be a cumulative reading, everything will end up being read, but by different people. So you have a strange addressee. It’s like tossing a message in a bottle into the sea in some ways.

to sustain the desire to write that huge thing, what I did was transform every single entry, every single work, into a question mark . . . what’s tickling there and why?

Yve-Alain Bois

I always understood the entries as separate essays that you should be able to read without having to read the other ones. In the first volume this led to some repetition, and in the second volume I allowed myself some cross-referencing, like, “Dear reader, if you really want to know more about this particular issue, go see entry number X.”

BMYes, I noticed that.

YABBut I do that very rarely. It could have become a little dry, except that to sustain the desire to write that huge thing, what I did was transform every single entry, every single work, into a question mark: what’s curious about that work, what’s new about that work, what has to be explored? It’s not necessarily something the reader will feel, but that’s the way I did it for myself: what’s tickling there and why?

I was looking in the catalogue raisonné that Angelica Rudenstine did of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which in many ways was my model, you know, kind of dosing hard evidence with interpretation. She said something similar, that for each work you have to find an enigma. And there are some works for which the enigma was unbelievably complicated. For example, there’s one particular set of works, the screens that Ellsworth made for the Philadelphia Transportation Building restaurant. The evidence was so complicated that it took me almost three weeks to understand what I was looking at, between the sketches and the photographs. The work consisted of screens separating a restaurant and a bar. Some photos were taken from the restaurant side, some were shot from the bar, some were mirror reversed, some printed upside down. Everything was destroyed soon after it was made except the models in wood and cardboard. Just to understand what I was looking at and to correct all the mistakes that had been written about it—because people, including Ellsworth, didn’t remember very well—was just an unbelievable task. That entry is one of the longest in the book. It took forever.

One thing people had warned me about with this project was getting bored, but in fact I gained more and more respect for Ellsworth and for his minute sense of detail, the way one millimeter of change changes everything.

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, Sculptural Screens in Brass, 1957, 7 brass screens, each: 60 × 54 × 12 inches (152.4 × 137.2 × 30.5 cm); installation view, Philadelphia Transportation Building. Photo: Lawrence S. Williams

BMAs an object, the book is so beautifully designed.

YABIt was a good team: all the people at the studio in Spencertown, first of all, for many years, and then, at the end of the process, the editor Eric Banks and the designer Joseph Logan.

BMI had the same experience when we worked together. They’re brilliant at their craft, but they also understand the art of collaborating with the person who’s putting the thing together, in this case you. I love that you’re sharing many things that Ellsworth said to you while he was alive and you were working together.

YABThat was one of the reasons I wanted to get as much information as I could from—what’s the expression, from the horse’s mouth? I spent at least ten years going twice a month to Spencertown and spending sometimes two, three days with him. And you know, Ellsworth always claimed that he didn’t like to talk. In fact—

BMYou couldn’t get him to stop.

YABYou couldn’t get him to stop. But what I understood was that if you asked him something very precise, you’d get a direct answer, and then he’d stop. So I adopted a different tactic that wouldn’t prevent him from going into lots of interesting digressions, which led to other things about other works that he wouldn’t have remembered otherwise.

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, Sculptural Screens in Brass, 1957, 7 brass screens, each: 60 × 54 × 12 inches (152.4 × 137.2 × 30.5 cm); installation view, Philadelphia Transportation Building. Photo: Lawrence S. Williams

For example, we were speaking one day about Pony, one of his first sculptures. That led him to a whole discourse about the Rockers, very complicated works with several iterations, the 1950s for the first one, the 1960s, and then the 1980s. So I don’t know exactly how we’ll do it in the catalogue raisonné, probably in three different batches. But what’s interesting is that they’re all based on the principle of a circle cut up in different ways. First of all, you have to turn them around to appreciate them, which is very unlike most of Ellsworth’s sculptures, as I mentioned before. And when you think they’re symmetrical and look regular, it’s the reverse: in fact they’re nonsymmetrical and irregular. And when you think they’re irregular, in fact they’re symmetrical and regular. So it’s really a trick that he developed, it’s amazing. To discuss them all together is kind of crucial.

BMEarly on, people didn’t really understand the breadth of his genius and what he was doing. That’s why I’m so happy to see, when I look in the provenance, that even things from the 1940s and ’50s are now, over the last twenty years, in these incredible collections.

YABA big change happened after the National Gallery show. If I remember well, there were only seven works in that show that didn’t come from the studio, and except for one of those, all had been gifts of the artist to their owners, including the one he had given to [the Museum of Modern Art]. It was unbelievable that not a single museum or collector had ever inquired about them during the four or so decades after they were painted. Today most of these “French” works are in museum collections or are promised gifts to them.

BMPeople didn’t really understand what he was doing. He probably felt fortunate to have you as a friend and someone working on these projects.

YABWe had a very good relationship. And you know, he was a very exacting critic of his own work. Especially during one period of his life when he wasn’t satisfied with one work, I would go there, and at the beginning of one month there was a three-panel work on a wall of his studio, let’s say red, blue, and black. But he didn’t like the red. The red is no good, he’d say. I would come back two weeks later: the red is still no good, it had changed a little bit but barely. And then suddenly—

BMThe red was good.

YABThe red was good [laughter].

Artwork © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation; photos: courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio

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