Ellsworth Kelly - Career

Career

After being abroad for six years, Kelly decided to return to America in 1954. He was interested after reading a review of an Ad Reinhardt exhibit, to which he felt his work related. Upon his return to New York, he found the art world “very tough.” Although Kelly is now considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American art movement, it was hard for many to find the connection between Kelly’s art and the dominant stylistic trends. In May 1956 Kelly had his first New York exhibition at Betty Parsons’ Gallery. His art was considered more European than was popular in New York. He showed again at her gallery in the fall of 1957. Three of his pieces: Atlantic, Bar, and Painting in Three Panels, were selected and shown for the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibit, "Young America 1957.” His pieces were considered radically different from the other twenty-nine artists’ works. Painting in Three Panels, for example, was particularly noted; at the time critics questioned his creating a work from three canvases. For instance, Michael Plante has said that, more often than not, Kelly’s multiple-panel pieces were cramped because of installation restrictions, which reduced the interaction between the pieces and the architecture of the room.

Kelly eventually moved away from Coenties Slip, where he had sometimes shared a studio with fellow artist and friend Agnes Martin, up to the ninth floor of the high-rise studio/co-op Hotel des Artistes at 27 West 67th Street. Kelly left New York City for Spencertown in 1970 and was joined by his partner, photographer Jack Shear, in 1984. Since 2001, he has been working in a 20,000-square-feet studio reconfigured and extended by the architect Richard Gluckman in Spencertown. Kelly and Shear moved to their current residence, a wood-clad Colonial house built circa 1815, in 2005. Shear serves as the director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.