Ellsworth Kelly

(1923 Newburgh, USA–2015, Spencertown, USA)

Sketches and works on paper, 1960s
Published in Artforum, October 1996
Private collection

In her book Couture Culture, fashion historian Nancy Troy notes that the idea of the ready-made, which was revolutionary for art, was conceived by Marcel Duchamp in America. Duchamp, creator of the famous Fountain, was inspired by ready-made clothing stores—a new phenomenon for capitalism—and incorporated the practice of demonstrating and selling factory-made objects into his art. Troy emphasizes that this was more of a realistic sketch of the mass culture of everyday life than a Kantian or Hegelian philosophical insight. In light of this interpretation, Duchamp’s art is not so far from the still life paintings of Jean-Baptiste Chardin or Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. A pioneer of postwar geometric abstraction, Ellsworth Kelly also took his initial impulse from everyday life. These archival documents show how he drew general outlines of the skirts, shirts, and trousers of ordinary passers-by in search of a complete expressive form. “Everything I saw became something to be made, with nothing added,” Kelly wrote in his diary in 1969. “It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already-made.” From Kelly’s paintings we can “retrieve” sewing patterns, and through them the connection to clothing as such, independent of marketing tricks and runways.