The Poetic Space of Ellsworth Kelly’s Prints
A suite of prints by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) is currently on view through August 12, 2018, as part of the Ransom Center’s “Stories to Tell” exhibition. By Tracy Bonfitto
The Mallarmé Suite comprises four monochromatic lithographs created in conjunction with the 1992 Limited Editions Club publication of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (often translated to A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance), which is illustrated with 11 original black-and-white lithographs by Kelly.
Each of the four prints that make up The Mallarmé Suite features a block of thick, matte, uniform color — in red, green, blue, and black — on a sheet of white wove paper. Severe lines sliced at different angles articulate each color shape starkly from its white sheet, causing the inked portion to read as a separate, distinct surface. The result is a surprising dimensionality.
Independently, each print has its own identity as a beautiful, striking form that makes economical and powerful use of line. The four prints together constitute a single artwork — one that is only realized upon meeting the artist’s exacting terms for display on the wall. Included as part of the suite are Kelly’s requirements for display, which consist not only of the order in which the prints are to appear from left to right but, more meticulously, specifications for the mat (8-ply, 100% rag-board, mounted with 3¼ inches at sides and top and 3½ inches at the lower edge), and the frames (white rub ramin glazed with UV-4 plexiglass). Beneath Kelly’s typewritten notes is a hand-drawn sketch with annotations to indicate the exact required measurements of the frame face and depth.
Displayed as per Kelly’s instructions, the angle of the red print at the far left sharply draws the eye toward the center of the suite, a movement that is advanced by the more mildly angled green form. The two right-side prints — the blue and the black — for their part gently disrupt the momentum of the eye’s sweep across to the right by anchoring the viewer’s vision towards the center of the suite via their subtler angles. The right-most print — the black color shape, with its slightly angled lower edge — acts both as a nudge towards the suite’s center and as a full stop, providing a final visual landing point.
Exacting installation specifications and deep attention to interior settings of display are hallmarks of Kelly’s practice. In the artist’s 1952 series of cotton-dyed panels entitled, Red Yellow Blue White, the 22-inch space between each of the five panels contributes as much to the work as the configuration of the dyed panels themselves. The four wall-sculpture panels that make up Kelly’s 1993 Memorial at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were designed in relation to the walls, windows, and stairs that are also part of the museum’s third-floor lounge, and the panels interact with the space’s ever-changing light and shadows. Architecture, as Kelly intimated to influential art collector and dealer Betty Parsons in the late 1950s, makes its own demands on artists.
But architecture, as the Limited Editions Club publication of Un Coup de Dés makes clear, need not only be understood as the physical spaces of wall and gallery. The structure of Mallarmé’s poem also provides an intriguing space within which Kelly’s prints operate.
The poem is itself a spectacle, a 20-page upheaval of the reader’s visual experience that implements varying typeface, print size, and white space. Anticipating the concrete poetry movement of the twentieth century, Un Coup de Dés was a radical typographical experiment. In preparation for its original publication in the London-based magazine Cosmopolis in 1897, Mallarmé provided exact specifications for the way in which he wanted the shape, size, and spacing of words to be arranged on the printed page. The poem as a result is structured to act on one level as something of an exploration of vision, in that it directs the eye along an inconsistent track from page to page, top to bottom and across, sometimes moving smoothly and sometimes jarringly. On several pages the placement of words assumes the form of a constellation of stars.
There are a number of deep currents of commonality between Kelly’s practice and Un Coup de Dés. With their close consideration of “already-made” forms, both can be thought of in relation to the very act of seeing. There is resonance also between the poem’s interest in the arbitrary roll of the dice and Kelly’s earlier investigation of the function of chance in the creative process.
Kelly himself determined the placement of his lithographs within the Limited Editions Club’s publication of Un Coup de Dés. A sweeping, harshly angled form placed between the pages upon which the outsized, bolded declaration “UN COUP DE DÉS / JAMAIS” acts as an emphatic fist on a table. The very subtle arc of the form placed a few pages later anticipates the more even distribution of the words on the page of text to follow, where the actions and limitations of “LE MAÎTRE” (“the master”) are contemplated. Kelly’s prints inhabit the architecture of the poem as his other works inhabit their display settings.
Our display celebrates and coincides with the opening of Austin, the only freestanding building designed by Kelly, located on The University of Texas at Austin campus.
Artist designed building with installation of colored glass windows, black and white marble panels, and redwood totem
60 ft. x 73 ft. x 26 ft. 4 in. ©Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Photo courtesy Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin
In addition to the suite on display, researchers can view the Limited Editions Club publication of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard, with 11 original black-and-white lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly (New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1992), as well the original 1897 publication of the poem in Cosmopolis, in the Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room.
Tracy Bonfitto is the Ransom Center’s Curator of Art
