Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.misc From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Kelly: Mediocre in the abstract Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 20:06:09 EST Message-ID: \SE D;ARTS;ART \HD Kelly: Mediocre in the abstract \SH ELLSWORTH KELLY: THE YEARS IN FRANCE \BY Eric Gibson \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES On the whole, exhibitions from an artist's formative years are some of the most interesting a museum can organize. They bring the creative act to life by providing an over-the-shoulder view of an artist working his way from apprenticeship to maturity, from inchoate idea to his own distinct language. Besides being enlightening, such exhibitions can be riveting. This was true of the small show in New York a few years ago of early sculpture by the modernist Constantin Brancusi borrowed from his native Romania. But "Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954," which opens today at the National Gallery of Art, is a different matter. Instead of showing the emergence of a sound artistic idea from the crucible of trial, error and rigorous self-criticism, it offers a lesson in what can happen when an artist abdicates the task of originating ideas to the laws of chance and casual everyday experience. On exhibit are some 120 works of art - paintings, collages, drawings and photographs - made by Mr. Kelly when, as a young artist, he traveled to France on the GI Bill and studied art. He stayed there for six years. It was in France that Mr. Kelly evolved from a representational into an abstract artist. One thing is clear at the outset of this show: It is easy to see why the change came about. Judging by the figurative work here, Mr. Kelly was going nowhere as a representational artist. The work on view amounts to little more than heavy-handed pastiches of Pablo Picasso and others, often quite bad ones. Mr. Kelly's route into abstraction, however, was through representational art. Much taken with random patterns and unexpected perspectives - the play of light and shadow on a wall or flight of steps, the silhouette of a bridge arch and the like - Mr. Kelly would photograph them and extract the abstract components of these images for use as the basis of his paintings. For example, he used the structure of one of the windows of Paris' Museum of Modern Art as the basis of one construction. At the same time, he gave an active role to chance both to generate an abstract or semiabstract image as well as to organize it. Typical of this aspect of Mr. Kelly's work is a series of paintings from the early 1950s composed of colored grids called "Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance." Here and there, Mr. Kelly's efforts produce something quite charming. Two early paintings of flowers, black silhouetted against white and vice versa, exert a modest pull. But that is about as powerful as the electricity gets in this show, which, far from really engaging one, makes the eyes glaze over all too quickly. The reason is simple enough. At least once in the catalog, Mr. Kelly is compared with Piet Mondrian, the Dutch pioneer of abstract art. This is because Mondrian, like Mr. Kelly, began with an image in nature and gradually transformed it into his trademark geometric imagery of colored squares separated by black horizontals and verticals. The comparison is a revealing one, but not in the way Mr. Kelly's admirers believe. It highlights the differences between the two artists, not the similarities. Mondrian's route into abstraction began with what are known as his "Pier and Ocean" paintings. In them, the image of a pier projecting away from the viewer across water and thus into the space of the painting was gradually simplified into a network of small, separate horizontals and verticals that emphasized the surface on which they were painted - the so-called "Plus and Minus" paintings. From those Mondrian evolved his signature style. But although description may make it sound that way, Mondrian's language of geometric form wasn't simply a boiling down of nature to its essentials. Indeed, after a time, there ceased to be a specific subject. That is because his abstract style was for him a metaphysical statement, an expression of what "nature" - the world outside the studio - meant to him. For Mr. Kelly, by contrast, abstraction is simply the extraction of a kind of structural core of something seen - like the green center of a garlic clove - and its transferral to a canvas. However much they might allude to its source in nature - and such allusions form a crucial part of Mr. Kelly's art - they finally exist as nothing more than arrangements of color and line on a canvas. This is why any comparison between Mondrian and Mr. Kelly ultimately fails. Mondrian's art addresses itself to something authentic and enduring, while Mr. Kelly's, however authentic in the sense that it is honestly arrived at, never really adds up to more than so many different colors and shapes. It is what people who don't like abstract art think it can only ever be - a kind of decoration, abstract art as interior design. (This quality is unwittingly recognized by the National Gallery itself, which unwisely chose to use one of Mr. Kelly's paintings for the outside of its press kit.) The ascendancy of chance and the reliance on other devices outside the artist's immediate control - the shape of the canvas, for example - to dictate artistic form and structure has been one of the dominant elements in modern art. It has produced some great works, such as the painting of the Catalan surrealist Joan Miro. It has also produced disasters, such as the recent work of Robert Rauschenberg, lavishly presented at the National Gallery just over a year ago, as well as the entire career of the late John Cage. Mr. Kelly's work, fortunately, isn't in the latter category. But it doesn't fit into the former by any stretch of the imagination. It isn't particularly good, but neither is it bad in the sense of being a total failure of ideas, craft skills or both. It is simply extremely uninteresting. ***** WHAT: "Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954" WHERE: National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW WHEN: Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Open till 7 p.m. Nov. 27 and 28, Dec. 16 and Jan. 2. PHONE: 202/737-4215 This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM