Ellsworth Kelly The Early Drawings, 1948-1955

Despite that, casual encounters with Kelly’s work continue to reinforce my old suspicion that his work is often attractive but without depth, at best that of the proverbial petit maître. While I hardly expect any critic or historian to adjudicate my aesthetic judgments for me, I was hoping that Yve-Alain Bois’s most recent contribution to the literature on Kelly, another examination of his fruitful and multifaceted early years in France, would give me a clue. Unfortunately for me, in this case Bois has elected to write here as a historian only and not as a critic, which is to say, he mostly assumes that the aesthetic judgments have already been made—that the value of the work and the reason for it are already clear. Treating the drawings discussed and reproduced as “a series of windows opened onto the private sphere of the studio” (17), Bois’s essay is structured as biography, however substantial and detailed its attention to Kelly’s artistic thinking, which is seen as being primarily concerned, in this period, with a resistance to composition. He shows that there are “four major non-compositional strategies used by Kelly during his French years” (17)—which Bois dubs “transfer” (basically, indexical transcription), chance, grids, and the monochrome panel—and he shows how and why Kelly arrived at these strategies for avoiding composition with its concomitant sense of authorial intention or agency. What Bois does not do, unfortunately—and it is something one would think him supremely qualified to do—is to explicate what happens in the work when this evasion or dissimulation of agency is accomplished: when it is a dialogue no longer between maker and object, but between object and viewer. And he doesn’t approach the big question: Isn’t it precisely the evasion of overt agency that constitutes the great limitation of Kelly’s work, the point where self-restraint becomes self-defeating, marking a deficiency of rhetorical exuberance or emotional generosity?