Photo By Gail

I love this large painting by colorfield expert, Ellsworth Kelly. Colors for a Large Wall (1951) is made up of 64 panels and is one of the largest paintings Kelly made during the years that he lived in France. The organization of the work, aside from the decision to arrange its sixty-four square panels in a grid, is totally arbitrary; the sequence of colors was governed only by taste, and the colors themselves were derived from commercial colored papers purchased at art stores.

The work began, as was Kelly’s custom at the time, with the creation of a collage. Using squares of colored papers left over from a previous series of collages, Kelly made a study for Colors for a Large Wall. He then precisely matched the hues of the papers in oil paints, and arranged the final, full-size panels in strict adherence to the paper model.

Ellsworth Kelly’s Colors for a Large Wall is part of the Permanent Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Installation View, Photo Added on September 4th, 2020