An artist out on his own

Ellsworth Kelly has been "placed" in various contexts - hard edge abstraction, what in New York used to be called "post-painterly" abstraction, Minimalism etc. None of these labels have ever fastened on to him securely, however, and it has become plain that he is a painter out on his own and following his own trail. Contemporaries who once appeared to be travelling on lines roughly parallel to his, now seem irrelevant to his style or his achievement. While Frank Stella falls farther and farther back along the track, and Kenneth Noland has almost vanished, Kelly's standing has grown until he is now accepted as a living Old Master.

Kelly - or rather his work - has been seen several times in Dublin, the first occasion being the Art USA Now show at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1964. He has also been included in Rosc and has visited Ireland in person.

Born in New York State in 1923, by now he has nearly half a century of work behind him and is a respected sculptor as well as one of the foremost living abstract painters. Kelly, in fact, is one of those exceptional artists (Degas, Picasso, Matisse are among them) whose style and vision translate into both arts equally well, even if his sculpture is scarcely three-dimensional and consists mainly of flat metal cut-outs.

Reproductions are almost useless in conveying the sheer quality of his work, which depends heavily on an exact sense of scale and on perfect taste, handling and finish. If you have seen only colour-plates of his paintings in some art book or magazine, you get little sense of their true quality, since in reproduction they resemble those of a few dozen other hard-edge and colour-field painters who practice(d) a harshly simplified kind of abstract geometry. They may even bring back dusky memories of all those flat acrylic surfaces of 25 years ago, lifeless, lustreless and, above all, dull. It was a time when hundreds of people seemingly believed that they could produce acceptable abstract pictures by rote, plus several yards of masking tape.

The exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London is not huge in numbers but very high indeed in terms of sheer quality; in fact these sharply profiled, often monochrome works produce a mounting sense of exhilaration in spite of their almost functional bareness. I had tended to think of Kelly as very much an all-American painter, yet his roots in European art are plain to see and they obviously go deep, as well as far back. He may be American in his energy and boldness, yet the legacy of European Constructivism and of European abstraction - including the early, pioneering abstractionists - is easy to detect. Which is hardly surprising, since Kelly lived in Paris from 1948 to 1954 and the foundations of his style were laid there (he had served in France earlier as a GI).

In 1954 he decided to move back to New York, where he worked until 1970 when he moved to Spencertown in the north of NY state. That has been his base since, and he has seen his reputation ripen and expand to a point where many or most critics would include him among the half-dozen or so finest living painters. Yet his coolly geometrical style must for a time have been dead against the current of things, particularly in 1950s New York in the heyday of de Kooning and Pollock and the turmoil and free brushwork of Abstract Expressionism.

Kelly quite often dispenses with the square or rectangular format and uses curved or specially shaped canvases. Early on in his career he employed simple, biomorphic shapes against a monochrome "ground" but gradually he moved more and more into works in a single colour, though sometimes in more than one piece or "panel". So his pictures do come close to being objects and the same is true of his sculptures, mostly flat knife-on-edge works which he also frequently colours in monochrome. As the note to the Tate exhibition says (and I see no point in paraphrasing it): "The shapes produce a range of spatial effects and the works appear to float magically in space."

This may sound dangerously trite and formalistic, yet there is nothing cold or dry about the result, though plainly Kelly possesses an excellent analytical brain to back his inborn flair. These works are, on the contrary, glowing and positive, with an authoritative, almost hieratic presence, and the paint is applied with a master's touch, not the kind of flat impersonality so much in vogue 20 years ago. Kelly is a perfectionist who thinks a lot over his work and seemingly can wait for a long time before deciding on just the right colour or shape; and even then he may touch and retouch it.

Rather surprisingly, this pure geometry has its roots in things seen - the curve of a bridge or a hillside, the angle of a doorway, even (as in Green/White) the colours of a woman's scarf glimpsed in Central Park. In the latter case, this forms a plunging triangle of white and green; another picture is built up in three parallel bands of colour (the primaries, red, yellow and blue). So simple! - and so subtle too, the subtle simplicity which takes most of a lifetime's working and thinking to achieve.

This exhibition runs until September 7th, and with the big Mondrian exhibition now also open at the Tate, two masters of abstraction can be seen in the same gallery, if not exactly side by side.