Ellsworth Kelly

This stunning monograph on the work of American artist Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923), produced in close collaboration with the artist, takes a remarkably detailed examination of the artist's work across his career, placing Kelly "in the pantheon of modernist masters that includes such 20th-century luminaries as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso." Paik, a curator of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, follows Kelly from his early experience creating camouflage patterns for the U.S. military during WWII to his residence in Paris in the late 1940s and early '50s, where he learned to "resist invention" and use "already made forms." He arrived in New York City in 1954, and later retreated upstate to Spencertown. Paik locates Kelly within an ever-shifting constellation of artists and movements, and reviews Kelly's vast oeuvre of paintings, sculptures, reliefs, drawings, prints, and large-scale commissions. She also examines his employment of many materials, including wood, aluminum, and weathering steel. The book features substantive contributions from art critics such as Robert Storr, Gary Garrels, Richard Shiff, and Gavin Delahunty, who further serve to place Kelly's complex and label-defying achievement into context. This work of beauty and scholarship proves that Kelly is one of the great master artists of the last century. (Oct.)