"You take a canvas, divide it up like a checkerboard... and go from there." - Man Ray

Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments
Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments
About the film
  • Year
  • Categories
  • Duration 65 minutes
  • Producers Edgar Howard, Jo Carole Lauder, Muffie Dunn
  • Directors Edgar Howard, Thomas Piper

“In my paintings I’m not inventing; my ideas come from constantly investigating how things look.”– ElIsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly is widely regarded as one of the most important abstract painters, sculptors and printmakers working today. Kelly insists on the connection between abstraction and nature from which he extrapolates forms and colors.

Since the beginning of his career, Kelly’s emphasis on pure form and color and his impulse to suppress gesture in favor of spatial unity, has played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America.

This hour-long documentary, shot in High Definition, elucidates the true complexity of the artist’s work. In following Kelly as he revisits the Paris of his early twenties, the film uncovers early influences which became leitmotifs that he would return to, reiterate, refine, and re-work for decades to come.

A spinal sequence showing, from A to Z, Kelly’s creation of two wall sculptures commissioned for the new U.S. Embassy in Beijing, provides a dramatic thrust to the film.

Insightful commentary from scholars and critics including Robert Storr (Dean, Yale School of Art), Anne d’Harnoncourt (Director, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Alfred Pacquement (Director, Centre Georges Pompidou), Ann Temkin (Curator, MoMA) and Roberta Bernstein (Professor, University at Albany) helps to round out this definitive portrait of one of the true giants of American art.

Winner of Award for Best Film for Television — 26th Annual Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), Montréal

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Ellsworth Kelly & Jack Shear: Kindred Aesthetics, Mt. Lebanon Shaker Village
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