Kelly, Ellsworth. Line Form Color. Harvard university Art Museums, 1999.

I propose to create a book which will be an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements, aiming to establish a new scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, providing a way for painting to accompany modern architecture.
There has been a growing awareness among young painters, that painting return to the wall as in the days before the Renaissance. The scale of the painting and its placement will become a direct, spontaneous, visual experience. It will speak to people anonymously as did the art of Egypt, the art of the great periods of China and India, of Byzantium, and of Europe during the Middle Ages (the glass and sculpture of Chartres).
In America there is no painting to accompany contemporary architecture. Recently at New York City's Museum of Modern Art there was a "Symposium: Art with Architect re," headed by Philip Johnson. They were unable to solve their dilemma: "what kin of art should be used with the new United Nations building?" It was stated that American artists lacked the scale for working with modern architecture.
Creative painting today means easel painting, "the original oil painting," sold through galleries to private collectors, and to museums, to be hung on walls. This painting has no relation to the architectural wall; it is an expression of the artist's separate personality. I believe that artist should work directly with the architect, building as the architect builds.
Today, instead of the stained-glass of Chartres, Romanesque frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, Chinese calligraphy, Egyptian reliefs and sculpture, we have the cinema, the best-seller magazines and books, the radio and television, produced to "please," and for financial profit, not to teach, or to state an absolute truth.
Spirituality, the representation of nature, and the personality of the creator have been present, in varying degrees, in all the art that man has made. With the birth of easel painting, in the Renaissance, spirituality began to give way to the artist's personality.
Spiritual art in the past has had an immense scale, covering entire walls of buildings. Much of the art that has survived from the ancient civilisations has been monumental, and compared with the art of today, appears anonymous, while the art of the twentieth century is personal on a very much smaller scale.
The book I plan will be an alphabet of lines, forms, values and colours, having no written word. Linoleum cuts will be made from approximately fifty drawings. The plate size will be approximately 8" x 10".

Project for a Book: Line, Form and Colour
Ellsworth Kelly
November 1951

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Ellsworth Kelly first conceived Line Form Color in 1951 as a series of studies, both drawings and collages. Later that year he applied to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a grant to produce a book, "an alphabet of plastic pictorial elements," but the application was not successful. With this volume, Kelly has brought Line Form Color to completion. Its forty plates correspond to the original collages. This slipcased edition also includes an essay by Harry Cooper, curator of modern art at the Harvard University Art Museums.

English; Paperback; 108 Pages
ISBN-10: 1891771051; ISBN-13: 9781891771057
Publisher: Harvard university Art Museums; Pub date: May 01, 1999
Dimensions: 20 cm x 20 cm x 2 cm

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Don't read. Get paper, rods, blocks.
Set them out, paint them, build.
El Lissitzky, Of Two Squares, 1920

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