CARA MANES: Thank you.
Thanks for coming, everyone thanks Veronica
for having me and thanks to the whole staff
at the Blanton.
I'm really excited to be here.
It's a lot warmer here than it was in rainy
cold New York when I left yesterday afternoon.
So as Veronica mentioned, I am an associate
curator in the Department of Painting and
Sculpture at MoMA but what she didn't mention
is that I also happen to have grown up down
the street from Ellsworth Kelly.
Only I didn't really know it at the time.
It wasn't until I left home went to college
and wound up in New York at MoMA that I finally
pieced together that where I came from was
basically mere steps from the place that Kelly
called home since 1970.
And then it wasn't until the winter of 2012
that I finally had the occasion to come back
home so to speak this time in order to meet
with Kelly in his studio in the context of
an exhibition that I was co organizing at
the museum that Veronica mentioned called
the Chatham series which was a series of 14
paintings that he made just after having moved
to Spencer town New York and obtaining painting
a studio in the nearby town of Chatham.
Each work in this Chatham series takes the
form of an inverted L-shape in his made of
two joined canvases each canvas a monochrome
of a different color.
The works vary in proportion and palette from
one to the next and careful attention was
paid to the size and scale of each panel in
the color selected in order to achieve a balance
and contrast between the two.
Research for the exhibition brought me to
the studio I showed up one day with a loaf
of bread in hand from the local bakery and
was warmly welcomed into Ellsworth's world.
He took me to his former Chatham studio here
you can see an image of it and he showed me
how the L shape that he developed for the
series in fact was inspired by the intersection
of the tall windows of the Chatham space which
you can see here on the facade and the interior
dropped ceiling beams on the inside.
So standing in that space looking at these
architectural details I understood physically
what I had been taught to understand intellectually
that though much of Ellsworth Kelly's art
is obdurately resolutely abstract it always
has its origins in what he sees in perceptions
as opposed to concepts.
In the case of the abstract L shape was a
translation of a detail that he saw in the
world around him.
And so in that kind of moment that our worlds
converge for a moment considering our shared
geographical proximity I fully began to understand
the importance of place for Kelly but Kelly
of course himself had first understood the
importance of place more than 60 years earlier.
A quarter century before moving to the tiny
town of Chatham Kelly spent six pivotal years
in the bustling metropolis of Paris which
he would call home from 1948 to 1954.
It is here that he developed the singular
abstract vocabulary of line form and color
that would come to define his singular contribution
to the history of post-war American art.
But before I get into all of that let's just
take a moment to reacquaint ourselves with
Kelly a figure who by now is of course so
familiar through the work here on UT Austin's
campus and in the Blanton's permanent collection
but whose biography might not be at the forefront
of our minds so just a very brief refresher.
Kelly was born in May 1923 in fact just two
weeks from today if I'm doing the math right
in Newburgh New York which was about an hour
north of Manhattan.
His family moved around a bit or throughout
the tri-state area as a child but eventually
settled in New Jersey where Kelly finished
high school.
Here you can see him making character drawings
for five cents as a student.
He then studied art at the Pratt Institute
for two years in Brooklyn before being inducted
into the Army in 1943 and as Veronica mentioned
he served in the Ghost Unit and I really encourage
you to come back, I want to come back, to
hear the talk about this really super fascinating
topic.
The Ghost Unit was a special force in the
US Army where troops impersonated other Allied
soldiers in order to deceive the enemy.
So here you have an image of him with a burlap
Jeep which may or may not have been a real
Jeep.
In 1944 his unit was sent to France first
to Normandy and then Brittany and then in
the fall of that year to a town just north
of Paris for a few weeks which is how he was
first able to visit the French capital.
As it turned out his time served served him.
Two years after his return from France he
used the funds available to him as a veteran
from the GI Bill in order to study art first
at the school of the Museum of Fine Art in
Boston where among the faculty that he learned
from was Max Beckman and Philip Guston and
then in Paris which is how he got himself
back to France but this time to stay for a
spell.
Kelly arrived in Paris in October 1948 bags
in hand.
He took lodging at the Hotel Saint George
on Rue Bonaparte indicated by the blue star
here on the map.
Within six months he would move to the Hotel
de Bourgogne on the right bank where he would
stay for three years.
In this moment in Paris's history the left
bank or Rive Gauche had become home to leftist
intellectuals and bohemian artists while the
right bank or Rive Droite was the site of
bourgeois high culture.
In time this would change and eventually the
once strict hierarchical distinctions would
loosen as fashion houses moved leftward and
alternative art spaces moved rightward for
example but it was certainly circumstances
that led Kelly to take lodging on the right
bank he just he an apartment was available
to him there.
But it is interesting nonetheless maybe to
just think about what this might have meant
at this particular moment in time and equally
sort of socio-politically it might be also
interesting to think about the kind of Parisian
cultural landscape during this period.
World War Two had forced a mass exodus throughout
europe and as a result in the years just after
the war new york city swelled with european
immigrants including artists dealers and intellectuals
whose cosmopolitan influence helped to reinvigorate
the city's Post Depression cultural climate.
European artists made meaningful contact with
their American counterparts in places like
Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century gallery
in midtown Manhattan and this exchange of
ideas was critical in determining the direction
that their art would take.
But it also marked the start of the shift
of the center of the artistic Avant-garde
from Europe where it was born and Paris where
it thrived to New York.
However Paris somewhat shaken by the effects
of the war saw an influx of American artists
many of whom were also taking advantage of
the GI Bill like Kelly.
These American visitors look to those who
stayed and made meaningful contact with them
where they could.
The list of those that Kelly made is long
and includes many of the pivotal figures of
the original Avant-garde so to speak such
as Marc Chagall Francis Picabia George Vantongerloo
and Alexander Calder to name but a few.
Still it's important to keep in mind that
the Paris that Kelly came to in 1948 was no
longer that of its pre-war heyday.
Gradually supplanting the artistic Avant-garde
was an intellectual one helmed by existentialist
philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre Simone
de Beauvoir and Albert Camus.
Through novels and treatises their questioning
of humankind's place in the universe permeated
a European culture now in a state of rebuilding.
Within a month of his arrival Kelly enrolled
himself at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where
as part of the curriculum he was required
to sketch from nude models in the classical
academic tradition.
But Kelley preferred to be out of the classroom
and instead in the world in the grand halls
of the Louvre or admiring the architecture
in Romanesque and gothic churches or simply
wandering the streets observing photographing
sketching.
This activity is at the heart of what happened
to Kelly during his time in France he found
a way to abstraction through the side door
of the observable world around him.
All of the stuff of his adopted home in France
provided an endless bank of images or references.
A brick wall a window a door a tree branch
a shadow on a staircase the reflection of
light on the Seine.
All of these images became fair game and here
I'm showing you just a few examples of the
photographs that Kelly took of these natural
and architectural details but I mean fair
game not simply for depicting things as they
exist in nature or trying to interpret them
through a composition but instead as formal
points of departure.
As images that Kelly then took to task trying
to capture their quality or their underlying
essence.
And he did this largely by leaving his own
hand out of it in an effort to communicate
as effectively as possible this quality without
getting in his own way to remain anonymous
as he was later described of this ambition.
The artist is present first and foremost through
the action not through the action of a painterly
brushstroke per se but through the primary
action of looking and of looking at things
often unnoticed.
And in fact it was through this looking that
Kelly found a new way of looking.
One of the sites that Kelly visited was of
course Notre Dame and here you can see a photograph
that he took of its facade in 1949.
I mentioned it specifically because to me
now this image takes on a new elegiac dimension
considering recent events.
I wonder how Kelly would have felt about the
devastating fire that ravished the Cathedral.
I happened to be there last week and it's
pretty intense but I would imagine he would
be in mourning as we all are.
At one point Kelly sketched the ceiling vaults
of Notre Dom's interior in ink on paper and
then ultimately turned the sketch upside down
in order to look at it instead as a something
of a plant like form.
As Kelly later recalled quote “I remember
that when I was about 10 or 12 years old I
was ill and fainted and when I came to my
head was upside down.
I looked down I looked at the room upside
down and for a brief moment I couldn't understand
anything until my mind realized that I was
upside down and I righted myself but in the
moment that I didn't know where I was it was
fascinating.
It was like a wonderful world”.
So what it's revealed to me at least in this
little anecdote is an important step in Kelly's
process toward his understanding of the translation
of things he observed in the world to a two-dimensional
flat surface.
The same process that he would deploy in the
Chatham series 20 years later and really in
most of the rest of his work since this time.
Here simply upending an image transformed
it into something else.
He also developed other strategies for turning
seen things into art things.
Sometimes this meant taking a crop reducing
a sketch of a thing down to its barest most
essential elements and you can see this strategy
at play in this small painting window one
from 1949.
Or and this is perhaps the most radical strategy
sometimes this meant simply taking a one-to-one
index of a thing as he did here in what he
considers to be his first significant work
of the Paris period.
This work Window Museum of Modern Art Paris
now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou
isn't either a representation of a window
nor an abstraction of a window but is instead
a concrete objective manifestation of a specific
form.
It is made of two painted canvases one of
which is placed behind wooden bars in the
lower register so that the two panels are
not on the same plane like this just as window
panes that slide past each other to open would
not be.
Of course these are opaque painted panels
not transparent glass which undermines the
essence of a window right to let light in
and serves as a kind of sly reminder that
what you're looking at is in fact an artwork.
And in their opacity they also perform the
important operation of deleting their reference
function they no longer reveal the world but
conceal it.
Here you can sort of see I just want to show
you the source image the source material the
windows on the facade of the Museum of Modern
Art of the city of Paris and also on the right
in an image that Kelly took of the window
himself.
As Kelly later described quote “Instead
of making a picture that was an interpretation
of a thing seen or a picture of invented content
I found an object and presented it as itself
alone”.
This was the true breakthrough for Kelly with
this work he made the argument that every
form that is visible in the world is suitable
as an object for an artist to create.
This meant to him that he no longer had to
invent content nor paint images he could simply
select the form of an object from within the
visible world reduce it and recreate it exactly.
So here in this context I'd like just to take
a tiny detour by mentioning the Readymade
as defined by Marcel Duchamp and championed
by others.
The idea of taking something from the world
and presenting it as an art object has a long
and studied history beginning with Duchamp
and in the teens.
Of course Duchamp made an important if scandalous
gesture in 1917 when he turned a urinal on
its side signed it with the pseudonym R. Mutt
and called the results art.
But here Kelly's project perhaps aligns a
bit more with what Duchamp called the assisted
Readymade and specifically one called Fresh
Widow though research shows that Kelly was
probably not aware of the work at the time
that he made his own window.
Still it seems perhaps interesting and worth
mentioning worth considering if not belaboring
the kind of points of interaction between
Duchamp's and Kelly's opaque windows in this
regard.
But anyway back to Paris.
Another significant thing happened here which
is what helped him push his the arguments
he was developing in new directions.
In June 1949 Kelly met John Cage and Merce
Cunningham.
Two American figures crucial in the development
of a new language for music and for dance
respectively who upended traditional notions
of their mediums and instead looked to quotidian
experience and the real worlds and the real
objects within it for inspiration.
The two happened to be staying in the same
hotel as Kelly for a while and when Cage came
to Kelly studio the two began an important
dialogue about chance.
A strategy at the center of Cage’s music
composition the music compositional strategy.
Kelly took the lessons learned from their
talks to heart and began to incorporate chance
into his own practice.
He had been aware of the ways in which chance
operations had figured into the work of the
Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s and was
and would be in dialogue with some of the
movements key figures.
Yet through this encounter with Cage something
clicked and Kelly became interested actively
in trying to deploy chance in his own work.
The other critical figure for Kelly in this
context was Jean Arp who he met the following
year in 1950.
Kelly talked Arp talked to Kelly through his
own engagement with chance which resulted
in a series of exercises that Kelly made involving
compositions of the random landings of scraps
of paper tossed into the air and here you
can see on the left a work made in this way.
He purportedly threw a piece of paper up in
the air and then you know composed the scatterings
of the paper.
This approach follows a project specifically
a project that Arp undertook in the 19-teens
in a group of Dadaist collages just the one
on the right where he ripped up the piece
of paper threw it in the air let the scraps
fall and then allegedly glued the scraps exactly
where they landed to a support.
But ultimately Kelly would make more complex
and sophisticated investigation of chance
in many paintings that followed.
But he would also continue to rely on art
as an important interlocutor.
In 1951 Kelly conceived of a book project
called Line Form Color as part of a bid for
a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation.
He had been teaching art to French school
children at the time at this point and in
this context he'd gotten the idea to produce
what he described as quote “An alphabet
of plastic pictorial elements”.
Comprising 40 uniformly sized drawings it
explored passages of straight and curved lines
formations of individual shapes as you can
see here and combinations of usually two to
three colors plus black and white.
Arp agreed to serve as Kelly's reference for
the application and you know wrote a letter
in support of it.
Although the application was rejected at the
time.
Finally in 1999 Kelly completed the book and
published it.
Now returning to chance throughout his time
in France Kelly had the occasion to travel
sometimes through chance encounters and sometimes
through planned events with those close to
him.
The scope location and duration of each trip
that varied but consistent throughout his
travels was the fact that each new site in
the country offered a new set of aesthetic
possibilities.
For example in the summer of 1950 Kelly went
to stay at the summer home of the in-laws
of his good friend and fellow American Jack
Youngerman the parents of the French actress
Delphine Seyrig in the town of Meschers in
the West Coast at the Seyrig's Villa named
Lacombe.
Kelly photographed the light hitting the staircase
and at the Villa and use this as an inspiration
for a group of four paintings for which he
translated the motif of the shadows on the
staircase into two dimensions without attempting
to achieve a sense of depth or to convey visual
distortion when rendering the three-dimensional
staircase into one plane.
Here chance determined the source image the
way the shadows were cast on the staircase
at the precise moment that Kelly photographed
it.
There are countless other examples of the
way that is in which he is engaging with chance
in this moment but another important and distinct
entry point for a chance to come into Kelly's
approach happen during the following summer
back in Paris when he was staying in the dormitories
at the University of Paris.
He had a dream that he made a large mural
quote “Composed of square panels on which
we painted black bands with huge brushes”.
To replicate the qualities of the dream painting
Kelly produced a study of brushed ink strokes
across the sheet of paper then cut the resulting
drawings into 20 squares and randomly recomposed
the drawing by shuffling the squares before
he glued them onto a support in a grid pattern
retaining the horizontal orientation of the
brushstrokes.
He then translated the individual squares
of the drawing into individual painted canvas
which is what you can see here each panel
each of the 20 panels is an individually painted
panel and then attached all of the panels
together.
This was his first multi panel painting.
The discoveries made in these first years
both in terms of indexing the world and allowing
for chance to play a strategic role all converged
in what Kelley later considered to be the
most significant artwork that he made during
his time in Paris Colors for a Large Wall.
A breakthrough in terms of scale and approach
Colors for a Large Wall is a massive multi-panel
painting composed of 64 individual one square
foot monochrome canvases arranged in an 8x8
panel grid.
Apart from this structural decision Kelly
left the works composition organization largely
to chance.
Like other investigations made in this moment
this one is derived from a collage that is
made of square cut squares of bright glossy
colored paper sheets backed with an adhesive
gum that were typically used in French art
classrooms so likely Kelly would have been
familiar with these materials or even used
them in his capacity as a teacher.
Kelly made the study using scraps leftover
from a series of collages 8 of them I'm showing
you two here that he had recently completed
titled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance.
In these colored papers he found a means of
capturing what he described as the quality
of light flickering across the surface of
the Seine that he could observe from his hotel
window.
In a way that both resisted a recapitulation
of earlier color theory reliant pointillism
and invented the invited the crucial element
of chance to come into play.
This breakthrough for Kelly gave rise to a
group of multi panel monochrome paintings
that tested various arrangements of smaller
numbers of colored units.
In this one there are five units for example.
In all of the works the role of drawing is
entirely removed from the surface of the canvas
the only lines visible are the literal borders
of the panels.
Absent any incident absent any depicted or
representational represented figure and rather
than attempting to simulate three-dimensional
perspective the multi monochrome panels become
kind of surrogate figures in themselves against
the ground of the white wall that they hang
on.
In this way then the painting engages the
architectural space that it inhabits with
the space between the viewer and the work
becoming an active area for viewing.
The wall becomes as integral a component to
the composition as the painting itself.
The space behind and around it as important
as the space occupied by the painting.
Here are just a few more examples of the several
works that test these possibility in numerous
ways.
Here Kite II has 11 panels the white panels
in-between the colored ones they're single
panels and the colored panels are two panels
a colored panel on top of adjoined to a black
panel.
And then here is one just one more this one
has five panels but the panels are arranged
in a square like in a square format instead
of vertically flanking each other to form
a row as the others.
There are so many stories that one could tell
of Kelly's productive stay in France.
From his many visits to other European cities
from that were easily accessible from his
Parisian perch to the first single panel monochrome
that he made after visiting Monet's studio
in Giverny where he encountered the later
work of the older artist who was then by then
deceased 20 years.
At this time in history the paintings made
by Monet in the last years of his life were
widely critically considered to be the kind
of pathetic output of an aging half-blind
once great impressionist painter.
So here but not so for Kelly here you can
see in the surface of Kelly's painting a much
more painterly treatment directly inspired
by the profound experience at least in the
way that he described it of being in the studio
surrounded by these forgotten overlooked works,
He painted this abstract picture that mixed
green and blue with visible feathered brushstrokes
that were called shadows flickering underwater.
A marked departure from his typically monochrome
resolutely anonymous approach to handling
paint Kelly had never done anything like it
before and never would again.
Interestingly it was at this time that the
late work of Monet was just beginning to be
reconsidered critically on the other side
of the Atlantic.
Monet's large nearly abstract all-over mushy
compositions maybe of lily pads on his property
as Giverny gained new significance in the
context of the equally large abstract all-over
compositions that the abstract expressionist
painters were making in New York.
But of course Kelly didn't know too much about
these goings on what with living in relatively
insulated world of Paris against the backdrop
of what I was explaining earlier was this
sort of the beginning of this transfer of
the Avant-garde from Europe to New York in
this period.
Kelly's first encounter with Avex came by
accident so the story goes.
One day in mid 1954 in a Paris bookshop Kelly
stumbled upon a copy of art news which had
featured images of the work of Ad Reinhardt
in a review of a recent show of his at the
Betty Parsons gallery in New York.
Feeling a kind of kindred sensibility with
Reinhardt's anonymous abstract compositions
paintings that investigated pure pigment and
minimize the artists hand you can't really
see in this ugly black rectangle but it does
all of that.
He began to think that it perhaps there might
be a receptive audience for his work back
home.
So again the story goes he packed up his art
dismantling the 64 panels of his Colors for
a Large Wall and boxing them up in the process
and returned with the whole shebang back to
the United States.
Back in New York Kelly had his work cut out
for him.
At the suggestion of an American friend in
Paris Kelly took a studio at 109 Broad Street
in lower Manhattan.
He also took a job as a mail sorter during
the nights to support himself but he struggled.
That summer Alexander Calder paid him a visit.
As I mentioned earlier the two had met in
Paris and Calder was impressed by the work
that he was making here in New York and by
the end of the year when Kelly was struggling
to make his rent Calder offered to cover the
costs.
Also significantly he offered to write a letter
on Kelly’s behalf to Alfred H. Barr jr.
the founding director of the Museum of Modern
Art.
Here you can see this terrific letter in the
MoMA's files of Calder championing his young
friend Kelly in which he writes “Dear Alfred
I've just seen the paintings of a young ex
GI painter recently returned from Paris and
I said I would write to ask you to visit him.
He is Ellsworth Kelly”.
Calder and Kelly remains lifelong friends
and Kelly would visit Calder in his home in
Roxbury Connecticut on and off over the coming
decades.
Two years after Calder's generous overtures
in 1956 Kelly gifted to Calder a painting
called Charmettes I which is a black-and-white
painting as you can see depicting the way
Kelly had recalled the way that the sunlight
projected shadows through the trees in the
eponymous southeastern French town where he
had spent some time.
So you see here Kelly's time in France comes
back pointedly and continuously throughout
his career.
Here though he's filtering his translation
of the observed world onto the canvas through
his own memory of a specific place.
So memory is a you know an additional kind
of element at play so who knows in what ways
this might have affected the composition.
Memories sketches or ideas born of Kelly's
time in France would continue to impact the
work made in the time since in myriad ways
and here's just one other example of this
the great White-Plaque: Bridge Arch and Reflections
in MoMA's collection which is based on a sketch
that Kelly made while living in Paris but
which he did not fully execute until he came
back to New York.
So in one way one could say that Calder served
as the initial matchmaker between Kelly and
MoMA but it was of course the merit of Kelly's
work that captivated the institution and initiated
what would become a productive and symbiotic
relationship between the two.
The story of Kelly and MoMA unfolds in many
layers.
First correspondence in the museum files reveal
that after reading the letter from Calder
Barr not wanting to make the trip all the
downtown from Midtown instead asked Kelly
if he could just you know deliver some of
the paintings up to his office.
Things would definitely worked differently
back then but Kelly to his credit kind of
boldly said explained like look guys like
these are big paintings no.
So instead curator great pioneering curator
Dorothy Miller came down to the studio to
have a look instead.
This meeting would prove to be a fateful one
because it resulted in Kelly's inclusion in
Miller's landmark exhibition Sixteen Americans
in 1959.
Along with Kelly this show introduced American
audiences to the work of fellow artists Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as well as to
the black paintings of the then I believe
just turned 20 year old Frank Stella.
In that show Kelly exhibited six paintings
here you can see three of them all made in
New York in the years since his return from
Paris.
So they're canvases that signaled a new direction
from his foundational period in France but
certainly were indebted to the discoveries
he made during it these paintings were all
single panels with compositions of curved
silhouettes shapes as you can see in the image
here.
In these years Kelly had moved from Broad
street down the street down the block to a
Coenties Slip where he lived and worked with
a tight-knit group of artists and friends
including Jack Youngerman with whom he was
close in Paris.
Robert Indiana Agnes Martin James Rosenquist
here you can see a group of these figures
cavorting on the roof of Coenties Slip in
this kind of iconic image by Hans Namuth.
The open skies of the New York Harbor visible
from his spot on Coenties Slip the streets
paved with stone blocks used for whaling ships
ballasts and the elevated train tracks etc
they all became new compositional fuel.
And just as he'd used the shapes of Parisian
architecture in his earlier paintings the
details of the buildings of lower Manhattan
and even the arches of the nearby Brooklyn
Bridge appeared in his work during this period.
Here you can see a work in MoMA's collection
that is directly taking that source as a point
of departure.
Flash-forward about 10 years to 1968.
The exhibition the Art of the Reel has just
opened at the Museum of Modern Art introducing
audiences to trends and Op Pop and hard edge
work of the then present and recent past.
This show organized by outside critic and
professor E.C.
Goossen sought to bring together works of
art that did not according to Goossen quote
“Strive to be realistic i.e. like the real
but to be as real in itself as the things
we experience every day.
The things we see feel knock against and apprehend
in normal physical ways”.
So one could perhaps not imagine a better
context for Kelly's work than a show like
this and indeed Colors for a Large Wall was
included in that show.
After the exhibition’s close however Kelly
made a rather bold and surprising gesture
when he offered the Museum of Modern Art this
painting as a gift.
During his years in Paris he had had only
one solo show at the then-new Gallery Arnaud
in 1951 and was included in a small handful
of groups that shows in France and abroad
during this period.
But by the late 60s at mid-career Kelly was
well established and well collected yet there
were no other paintings from Kelly's time
in France in the collection of any major institution.
The gesture of his having offered this work
to the museum might be seen then in a way
as a gentle nudge to the institution and by
extension to the art world at large.
Like hey look at this important body of work
for what it is.
It was a bit of a slow burn but by 1992 the
National Gallery [Laughter] slow-burn but
by 1992 the National Gallery of Art in collaboration
with the Jeu du Paume in Paris organised a
major survey of Kelly's years in France.
It and it's brilliant catalog with an extensive
essay by Evelyne Bouix initiated a broader
reconsideration of this period and resulted
in several works eventually making their way
into institutions.
And it's not I mean I'm oversimplifying slightly
like their work here and there but Kite II
I think that I showed you earlier was acquired
there in some time between 1968 and 1992 but
you get the point.
The Museum of Modern Art now counts five major
paintings from this period in its collection
and some 20 works on paper plus the entire
set of 40 drawings for the Line Form Color
book that I mentioned earlier.
And in the decades since the museum has worked
very closely with Kelly to ensure that our
holdings is as kind of robust and comprehensive
as it can be tracing the arc of the entire
career.
And that now and the number of holdings now
numbers in the hundreds.
I'd like to end by bringing us right back
to where we started to the topic of place.
The topic of place generally and to the place
where we find ourselves now specifically.
If the project Kelly developed in Paris was
to translate place into image then we might
think about this incredible chapel here on
campus as a kind of doubling or squaring of
that project.
Of translating place into image and then image
back into place.
To create the chapel Kelly first abstracted
from the worlds and of course we can see the
specific world of France coursing through
the chapel.
From its Romanesque layout to its Rose window
to its miraculous play of light and color
but extending beyond his two-dimensional work
Kelly managed to kind of reconstitute a world
inside the chapel.
Making it perhaps the grandest summation of
the themes and topics of Kelly's life's work.
You are all very lucky to be able to live
with it and to be able to live within that
world.
Thanks so much.
