Ellsworth Kelly, renowned for his bold abstract paintings and sculptures, also possessed a profound and lifelong fascination with the natural world, a passion distinctly manifest in his plant drawings. Spanning over six decades, Kelly's dedication to capturing the essence of flora is a testament to his versatile artistic skill and deep appreciation for the subtleties of form and line found in nature. These works, while may seem a departure from his more well-known abstract pieces, actually share a deep connection with his broader oeuvre, highlighting his nuanced understanding of form, color, and space.
The genesis of Kelly's plant drawings can be traced back to his early years, even before his formal exploration into abstraction began. Growing up in New Jersey, the artist found inspiration in the local flora, an interest that would flourish throughout his career. His approach to drawing plants—ranging from seaweed and flowers to leaves and fruits—was marked by a desire not to depict, but to distill their forms to their most basic essence, often using simple contour lines. This method paralleled his abstract work's reduction of visual elements to pure forms and colors (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) (Museum of Fine Arts Boston) (Norton Simon Museum).
Kelly's plant lithographs, particularly his "Suite of Plant Lithographs" created between 1964 and 1966, underscore this simplification and abstraction. These works, while detailed, focus on the fundamental shapes and lines of the plants, devoid of any unnecessary embellishments. Kelly's method for these lithographs involved enlarging the plants to allow for detailed examination, yet he rendered them in such a way that they straddled the line between botanical illustration and abstract art. His lithographs are celebrated for their minimalist approach, which, paradoxically, served to deepen his exploration into minimalism itself (Museum of Fine Arts Boston) (Norton Simon Museum).
Kelly's plant drawings were not just an artistic endeavor but also a deeply personal one. He likened these drawings to portraits, emphasizing the intimate act of observing and translating his vision of the natural world onto paper. Despite their simplicity, these drawings are rich in memory and personal experience, revealing a side of Kelly that is both contemplative and intimately connected with his surroundings. Throughout his career, Kelly maintained that these figurative works were instrumental in developing the way of seeing that would define his later abstract pieces, serving as a vital bridge between his observations of the natural world and his groundbreaking abstract art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) (Norton Simon Museum).
In 2012, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the first major museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to Kelly's plant drawings, spotlighting this significant yet often overlooked aspect of his oeuvre. This exhibition, featuring around 75 drawings that spanned the entirety of Kelly's career, underscored the importance of these works within his body of work and the broader context of modern art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Ellsworth Kelly's plant drawings reveal the artist's unending curiosity and his profound ability to see and depict the world in a way that bridges the natural and the abstract. These works not only add depth to our understanding of Kelly's art but also remind us of the beauty and complexity of the simplest forms in our environment.