The American artist Ellsworth Kelly, known for hard-edge paintings, simplicity of form in sculpture and brightly colored abstract designs in his printmaking, has died at 92, The New York Times reported December 27.
The report cited Matthew Marks of the Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan as announcing the death of the prominent minimalist.
Kelly was born in Oradell, in New York state, outside New York City, and as a young man studies at the Pratt Institute before he shipped out to Europe with the US military in January 1943.
After six years in Europe, the artist studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after his discharge from the Army in 1945.
“It was very traditional. It was all painting nudes, not much color. I liked Kandinsky. I wanted to do something different,” he said in an interview this month with The Guardian, in which he was said still to be hard at work on his art.
“I give what I’ve got. It’s harder. I can’t work on really big pictures any more, so the ideas are blocked a bit. But then, the visions were always too much,” Kelly said.
As an artist, Kelly’s key years were in Paris, which he had visited during World War II.
Later he returned to live and study in 1948 with support from the G.I. Bill — legislation which subsidized college educations for thousands of returning American soldiers.
Often classified as examples of abstract minimalism, many of Kelly’s paintings were of a single color, or two color blocks together.
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