Black Green Black Red, Ellsworth Kelly

Sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly, , dated 1989

Blue Green Black Red 1989
Painted aluminum
Each panel: 120 × 14¾ inches; 305 × 38 cm
Overall: 120 × 110¾ inches; 305 × 281 cm

Exhibited

Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Ellsworth Kelly: In-Between Spaces, Works 1956–2002, September 14, 2002 – January 19, 2003

Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Inaugural Exhibition of the Nasher Sculpture Center, October 2003

Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas, May 14 – August 22, 2004

Literature

Schipprack, Annette. “lch bin kein Rockstar.” Focus, October 13, 1997, p. 208, ill. in color.

Kelly, Ellsworth, Boehm Gottfried, and Viola Weigel. Ellsworth Kelly: In-Between Spaces, Works 1956–2002. Basel: Fondation Beyeler; Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2002, cat. no. 16, pp. 26–27, 29–30, 106–07, 161, ill. in color (as Blue Green Black Red (Study for Dallas Panels)).

Ellsworth Kelly Works 1956–2002. Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2002, ill. in color (exhibition brochure).

Wylie, Charles, ed. Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 44–45, 56, ill. in color (as Blue Green Black Red (Study for Dallas Panels)).

In a letter to John Cage in 1950, Kelly declared his wish to make paintings that would not just hang on the wall as pictures: “They should be the wall,” he wrote, “even better — on the outside wall — of large buildings.”

In 1989, the architect I.M. Pei asked Kelly to create a work for a new building he was designing for the Dallas symphony. The four 34-foot high, 4-foot wide panels Kelly made perfectly fill the limestone-clad atrium wall, which the artist treats as both a frame and a canvas for his work.

<p><em>Dallas Panels (Blue Green Black Red)</em> (1989) at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas</p> — *Dallas Panels (Blue Green Black Red)* (1989) at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas

Blue Green Black Red (1989) was made the same year as the Dallas Panels and in the same material and color sequence. When it was exhibited in the inaugural exhibition of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the curator Charles Wylie recalls that “Kelly slyly remarked that all the colors represented things present in Texas: sky, land, oil, and fire.”