Now on view in the Museum's main lobby as a special tribute to this celebrated artist, who passed away on December 27, 2015, Ellsworth Kelly's dynamic
Spectrum IV is composed of 13 narrow canvases, each painted a single color.
The units are arranged side by side in a chromatic progression and joined together to create a single work of art. Just as Kelly chose to begin the sequence with yellow, rather than the red or violet colors discerned at either end of the visible light spectrum, he likewise selected the particular shades of his spectrum's colors intuitively. This work is one of a group of Spectrum paintings that Kelly made between 1966 and 1969. He had first made multicolored works by joining together two or more single-colored panels while he was living and working in Paris in the early 1950s. After returning to New York City in the mid-1950s, Kelly devoted the next six decades of his career to exploring this abstract vocabulary of line, form, and color.
Watch Kelly discuss his work in this
MoMA oral history project video.
