The University of Kansas

Ellsworth Kelly

United States, born 1923
Red, Black, Blue, 1962
Oil on canvas
Gift of the Friends of the Art Museum and the National Endowment for the Arts, 76.67

In Drummer, by Larry Rivers, the spontaneous gesture created by the slashing of paint across the surface of the canvas suggests the energy of a jazz drummer. Rivers (who was also a jazz musician) made no attempt to record a visually accurate image of a drummer, but suggested the drummer’s animation through the use of expressive line and color. Artists like Rivers hope that viewers will grasp intuitively the content of their work. They consider the formal elements of art to be universal language, which they expect viewers to understand at an unconscious level.

During the 1960s artists investigating the formal properties of art began to pare paintings and sculpture down to their most essential characterizes, resulting in the style called minimalism. Painter Ellsworth Kelly takes his shapes from everyday objects, but enlarges them so much that they are unrecognizable. In Red, Black, Blue, the flat areas of color seem to advance and recede. For Kelly a painting’s essence consists of areas of color creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas. There is no background or foreground, and no subject other then the shapes and colors one sees. Unlike Drummer, there is no allusion to the world outside the painting.