How Philadelphia lost an Ellsworth Kelly piece and then gained a few more
Philly commissioned and lost an abstract public art sculpture created by one of America's most important post-war artists. But there's no need to despair just yet.
If you find yourself at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, visit the Marron Atrium on the second floor. Let your eyes dart across Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall, a shimmering grid of painted aluminum panels, each one cut and curved in its own weird way. There is no clear logic to the varying colors at play — sapphire blue, rust red, faint yellow, reflective silver — but the 104 panels sing together in a strange harmony.
Philadelphia deserves some credit for this piece. Credit for giving it away, at least. Kelly made the now-seminal work — originally titled Transportation Building Lobby Sculpture — for the Penn Center’s Transportation Building in the mid-1950s. After Greyhound moved its operations to Chinatown, the developer leased out the building to the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, but without the city’s first piece of abstract public art. Kelly even oversaw the dismantling of the piece. And that’s how this landmark of contemporary art slid out of our fingers and rode up the I-95 to New York.
Kelly is one of America’s most important postwar artists, and it’s hard to imagine how a city could fumble possession of one of his early masterpieces. But this is Philly, and I’ve been told there’s a word for things like this: phillukey. When something that happens is a fluke, but it’s a fluke that’s more likely to happen in Philly than other places. For example: when a trailblazing work of art lands in Center City, then gets evicted when the lease is up.
However, in Philly, we’ve kept more good stuff than we’ve lost. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a new gift of 18 Ellsworth Kelly drawings shows off his flair for making art out of thin air. The museum now has more than 50 works by Kelly, with the latest gift coming directly from his widower, Jack Shear.
The PMA is one of five museums to receive a $100,000 grant from the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, a way to celebrate the centennial of Kelly’s birth in 1923. (Until his death in 2015, at 92, he continued to make art and attend events while hooked up to an oxygen tank.)
A new show with the newly acquired drawings, called “Reflections on Water and Other Early Drawings,” hangs in the hallway of the PMA’s modern and contemporary wing. Kelly is known as a painter and a sculptor, but it was with a pencil that Kelly translated the busy, jumbled world around him into a poised and polished visual language.
Kelly’s work is always lifted from the world around him, from what he calls “fragments of vision.” These fragments came from staircases, walls, window frames, and views from trains.
We see how his drawings connected first impressions to final products. Study for Curve 1 shows the four-line blueprint to a weathered black steel sculpture called Curve 1, which you can see in the museum’s Sculpture Garden. Next to the drawing we see a flattened waxed paper cup: Kelly found this exact cup on the ground in 1968, then abstracted its outline into a contour drawing in 1973.
There’s a reason this show is in a hallway: An adjacent room hosts a permanent collection of Kelly’s oil paintings. You’re meant to walk from these drawings to the finished paintings to see how he turned pencil to paint, paper to canvas, fleeting thought to emphatic statement. See for yourself how the graphite drawing Study for Seaweed laid the foundation for the nearby painting Seaweed. Never mind that neither image looks like seaweed — more like a haunted barn that has grown wings — because the point is the process.
At art school in America, Kelly was a decidedly un-abstract and un-expressionist painter who came of age when abstract expressionism was the rage. Moving to Paris in 1948, he was an American squeezed between surrealism and Picasso. And yet somehow his approach and attitude toward art would long outlast the big names of abstract expressionism and Pop Art.
As for public art in Philly: We may have lost the Sculpture for a Large Wall to MoMA, but the Barnes Foundation hired Kelly to make a forever-Philly sculpture in 2011. The commission accompanied its 2013 show of Kelly’s work, the first contemporary art show that the Barnes had done in 90 years. Kelly’s 40-foot-tall steel sculpture, called the Barnes Totem, now towers elegantly — quietly, even silently — over the grounds of that museum. In this way it embodies the contradiction of Kelly himself: a quiet titan, with an impersonal signature, who more than anything wants you to look up.
“Ellsworth Kelly: Reflections on Water and Other Early Drawings” runs through Dec. 1, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Phila. https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/ellsworth-kelly-reflection-on-water-and-other-early-drawings