Abridged Kelly Retrospective Loses Its Impact

‘Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective,” which opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is a strong, concise, beautifully installed overview of an important artist’s nearly 50-year career. And I’m sorely disappointed by it.

Why the contradiction? Because at its debut last fall at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, some 250 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and collages laid out every aspect of Kelly’s artistic sojourn, providing lots of illuminating insights along the way. Yet the version that has now been sent on tour to Los Angeles (and next to London and Munich) is only a shadow of its former self: 40 paintings, three sculptures.

Call it a Reader’s Digest retrospective.

The outline of Kelly’s story is well known, and the truncated retrospective doesn’t do much to deepen it. Born in 1923, he was stationed for a year in England, Germany and France during World War II; after a postwar stint at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, he returned to Paris in the fall of 1948, courtesy of funds provided by the G.I. Bill. He stayed almost six years.

Two important and serendipitous events took place during those Paris years. First, the mature direction of Kelly’s art began to take shape, and, second, on the other side of the Atlantic, American Abstract Expressionist painting became the dominant force in art.

These simultaneous events are worth noting because, at its core, Kelly’s art couldn’t be more different from Abstract Expressionism. He shared with the New York School a commitment to abstraction as the appropriate artistic language for the Modern era, as well as a faith in painting as a highly individual enterprise. But in Paris he established a distinct and independent voice, which in retrospect now seems to foretell certain critical artistic attitudes that didn’t gain prominence until the 1960s.

Gestural painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning used their work as a spontaneous vehicle for highly personal expressive content. Kelly, by contrast, strove for a precise clarity of form, surface, contour and edge, which would erase from art any sign of an expressive self.

Colorists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman used painting as a tool for discovering an almost mystical knowledge. Kelly used fields of uninflected color to unveil the magic of quotidian perceptual experience: the arch of a bridge reflected in water, the syncopated rhythm of shadows falling across a flight of stairs, the swelling curve of a hill.

These formative impulses will be found in a half-dozen paintings at the chronological start of the MOCA show.

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In Kelly’s famous “Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris” (1949), a vertical white canvas is positioned above a recessed vertical gray canvas, which is overlaid with wooden mullions painted black. The opacity of this false window insists that you shouldn’t expect revelations from looking through art’s painted surface--that all you need to see will be found on the surface itself. Meanwhile, the apparent arbitrariness of Kelly’s abstraction is revealed to have an actual source in daily observation of ordinary things in the world.

Nearby, works like “Colors for a Large Wall” (1951) and “Red Yellow Blue White” (1952) complicate matters. Each work is made up of numerous small squares of canvas, each square painted a solid color. The order of placement of the color-squares in each composition was determined strictly by chance--thus eradicating personal expressiveness from the picture.

In the next gallery, which displays work made after Kelly’s return to the United States, the rectangular shape of his canvases enters into dialogue with a shape painted on their surface--say, a big, slightly tilted red square against a vertical white canvas (“Broadway,” 1958), or a wide, long, zigzagging black shape against a white rectangle (“Rebound,” 1955). Despite the simplicity of flat shapes and solid colors, complex visual movement and spaces are surprisingly created.

Finally, in the third gallery single-color panels return. Now, however, the panels are large. Much the way the earlier paintings used internal shapes to engage the shape and surface of the canvas, a dialogue now occurs between the individual color panels themselves, and between the panels and the wall and the space of the room.

Kelly’s crisply beautiful paintings are essentially shallow reliefs, which project from the wall. Inseparable from their environmental setting, these ecologically minded works assert that meaning is never independent or autonomous. Instead, it unfolds within a global network of indivisible relationships. Nature is thus a paradoxical touchstone for these geometric abstractions, whatever their other debts to artistic precedents as diverse as Jean Arp and Matthias Grunewald.

The remainder of the MOCA exhibition shows how Kelly has elaborated, pushed and refined those directions--to equal, greater and sometimes lesser effect--during the last 30 years. It’s an excellent introductory overview.

But it’s not a full retrospective--at least, not in the wide-ranging sense of a comprehensive, exploratory study of a major artist’s half-century of work.

The losses are most keenly felt in the first three galleries, where just 16 works date from the critical period of the late 1940s to 1967. An artist’s formative years tend to be the least well-known, while the implications for the mature work are dependent on them.

The complete absence of drawings, collages and photographs is also grievous. Adding as a coda a gallery of 10 Kelly prints, made locally at Gemini G.E.L. since 1984, is hardly consolation.

Not only do works on paper tend to display the most intimate aspects of emerging artistic thought, but the figurative features of many of Kelly’s early drawings would also have supplied provocative insights. He’s an artist who developed an abstract art based on the inseparable relationships between things, so it would have been helpful to see the inventory of his figurative subjects.

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Doorway, window, bridge, stairs, sluice gates, alley--almost exclusively, these early drawings describe passageways, in-between spaces or points of transition.

It’s common for an exhibition’s tour to suffer losses--works deemed too fragile to endure the perilous rigors of international travel, collectors reluctant to part with works for a year or more, differences in the availability of gallery space in the host museums and so on. Still, it’s uncommon for the touring version to bear almost no relation to its parent.

The Guggenheim show might even have been faulted for being a tad too large--as a survey it was both exhaustive and exhausting--but, if so, it was an embarrassment of riches. The result of the drastic condensation is a show with a wholly different tone.

In New York, “Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective” was an extravaganza that invited your active engagement in the unfolding nuances of a notable career. In L.A. it’s a respectful array of expert pictures, which declare the presence of an established master. At one you got to bear witness, at the other you’re urged to genuflect.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through May 18. Closed Mondays.