A pivotal call to colors

Twenty-five years ago, the first time I laid eyes on Ellsworth Kelly’s magisterial 1963 painting, “Red Blue Green,” it made me rock back on my heels. Some 7 feet high and more than 11 feet long, the sleek, uninflected surface of the canvas showed a crimson rectangle on the left and a curved blue area on the right, with a vivid, eccentrically shaped field of emerald green between them. Here was a work of art remote from most all that was new and making waves in 1978. Yet, like a message in a bottle washing up from a long-ago and distant shore, it caused an irrefutable thrill.

Painting was purported to be dead. Abstraction had been ousted as the 20th century’s cultural pinnacle. Video and performance were on the rise, and text was turning up everywhere in art. Color was being dismissed as frivolous and unworthy in a society marked by post-Vietnam, post-Watergate confusion. The paintings of Picasso and Matisse had been pushed aside by Duchamp’s mind-bending anti-art.

But here was “Red Blue Green,” which made oil paint, canvas and stretcher bars seem the sexiest thing to come down the pike in years.

Video art is what I was most consumed by then -- but Kelly’s painting snapped me to attention with all the precision of a tuning fork. It still does, every time I see it. At the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, a beautiful exhibition called “Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue” examines the germination of that great painting -- to my mind the single most important work in the museum’s collection.

I was a curator at the MCA San Diego when Kelly’s painting entered the collection in 1978. (My contribution to its acquisition consisted entirely of standing on the sidelines, drooling.) It has taken a quarter-century, but this show is exemplary in showing us where this key work fits in a major artist’s oeuvre.

Museum director Hugh M. Davies and curator Toby Kamps have assembled 35 works on paper, four small paintings and nine large ones to show how “Red Blue Green” ranks as a critical juncture for Kelly. A new three-panel painting, completed just last year, demonstrates the continuing resonance of that early turning point.

Kelly’s art is typically clear, precise and geometric in form, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a trace of brushwork in anything other than a study. His art erases the autobiographical traces of the artist’s hand and emphasizes its links to things seen in the world.

Among the works on paper is a black-and-white 1950 photograph of trapeze swings shot against the flat gray sky. The hanging chains and bars pick out a rectangle and a looped shape within a flat horizontal field. Flop the picture in your imagination, and its shapes turn up 13 years later as the unusual motif in the San Diego painting.

The color choice is similarly instructive. Red, blue and green are not the three primary colors when it comes to mixing pigments (yellow would take the place of green); instead they’re the primaries for mixing projected light. Can it be an accident that Kelly’s 1963 painting dates to the period when color TV began to explode across the American landscape? Kelly’s art isn’t Pop, but neither does it ignore the cultural zeitgeist.

The color-shapes are also carefully calibrated. The red and the slightly wider blue shapes seem suspended from the upper left and right corners, with the blue dipping into a curve that’s a little bit lower than the straight bottom edge of the red rectangle. Between them, the eccentric “leftover” shape is painted green.

Because of this eccentricity, the eye automatically reads the red and the blue as foreground shapes against a green background. But then the painting snaps into place as a flat, two-dimensional field, where no illusion of depth or of objects in space can be maintained. There are a couple of reasons for this.

One is the relative quantities of color -- more serene blue than fiery red, which together balance out against a green field that suddenly seems almost neutral. Another is the visually stable shape of a rectangle in the eye-dazzling color, while the swinging, swooping, shape on the other side is in the calmer hue. And the juxtaposition of red and green creates an optical line of vibration at the left, while the longer border of blue and green at the right is steadfast as can be.

Finally, the eccentric green shape spreads out beneath the red rectangle and the blue curve to reach the edges of the canvas at either side. It seems to lock everything into place. This is an immensely complex, sophisticated orchestration of size, shape, color, line and composition, which at first glance appears to be as simple as pie.

Indeed, one of the great things about the painting is that its simplistic appearance manages to grab your attention and not let go. For while you look, the sheer complexity of the painting unfolds like a plain bud erupting into a spectacular flower. “Red Blue Green” erases distinctions between nature and culture, as surely as a Cezanne landscape or a Matisse cutout does.

The works on paper from the 1950s include many ink and oil studies on newsprint or bits of cardboard, in which Kelly worked out the premises that would come to such stunning fruition in 1963. But the main event is the single room where “Red Blue Green” is joined by eight other large, related paintings made between 1963 and 1965, when the internal shapes within his paintings began to emerge as shaped canvases.

Several first-rate pictures are here. Seeing them together is not just informative; it provides one perhaps telling surprise.

The specific ruby red and emerald green that Kelly used in all the three-color paintings of the period are identical -- but the blue is not. Only San Diego’s painting employs a deep, rich sapphire hue; the rest use a more limpid, watery blue. The richer color stands up to the eye-dazzling red and green, and knocks the picture out of the park.

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‘Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla

Ends: April 13

Price: $6, adults

Contact: (858) 454-3541