This curriculum was typical of the broader trend in schooling that had emerged from the Progressive education theories promulgated by the Columbia University's Teacher's College, at which the American modernist painter Arthur Wesley Dow had taught.

[2] As his parents would pay only for technical training, Kelly studied first at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which he attended from 1941 until he was inducted into the Army on New Year's Day 1943.

While in Boston, he exhibited in his first group show at the Boris Mirski Gallery and taught art classes at the Norfolk House Center in Roxbury.

[9] There he encountered fellow Americans John Cage and Merce Cunningham, experimenting in music and dance, respectively; the French Surrealist artist Jean Arp; and the abstract sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, whose simplification of natural forms had a lasting effect on him.

Three of his pieces: Atlantic, Bar, and Painting in Three Panels, were selected for and shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibit, "Young America 1957".

[11] In 2015, Kelly gave his building design concept for a site of contemplation to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.

Titled Austin, the 2,715-square-foot stone building—which features colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture and black-and-white marble panels—is the only building Kelly designed and is his most monumental work.

[2] Observing how light dispersed on the surface of water, he painted Seine (1950), made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance.

Yellow Piece (1966), the artist's first shaped canvas, represents Kelly's pivotal break with the rectangular support and his redefinition of painting's figure/ground relationship.

[21] Green White (1968) marks the debut appearance of the triangle in Kelly's oeuvre, a shape that reoccurs throughout his career; the painting is composed of two distinct, shaped monochromatic canvases, which are installed on top of each other: a large-scale, inverted, green trapezoid is positioned vertically above a smaller white triangle, forming a new geometric composition.

[24] After leaving New York City for Spencertown in 1970, he rented a former theater in the nearby town of Chatham, allowing to work in a studio more spacious than any he had previously occupied.

The works vary in proportion and palette from one to the next; careful attention was paid to the size of each panel and the color selected in order to achieve balance and contrast between the two.

[25] A larger series of twelve works which Kelly started in 1972 and did not complete until 1983, Gray was originally conceived as an anti-war statement and is drained of color.

[30] Beginning in 1949, while living in Paris (and influenced in this choice of subject by Henri Matisse and Jean Arp) he began to draw simple plant and seaweed forms.

[31] The plant studies are, for the most part, contour drawings of leaves, stems and flowers done in clean strokes of pencil or pen and centered on the page.

[39] The Rocker series began in 1959 after Kelly's casual conversation with Agnes Martin, who lived below him on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan.

Playing with the paper top from a take-out coffee cup, Kelly cut and folded a section of the round object, which he then put on the table and rocked back and forth.

Kelly gave up painted surfaces, instead choosing unvarnished steel, aluminum or bronze,[41] often in totem-like configurations such as Curve XXIII (1981).

[42] Kelly's Blue Disc was included in the seminal 1966 exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, Primary Structures, alongside many much younger artists just beginning to work with minimal forms.

[citation needed] William Rubin noted that "Kelly's development had been resolutely inner-directed: neither a reaction to Abstract Expressionism nor the outcome of a dialogue with his contemporaries.

[1] During his last year in Paris, Kelly was ill and also suffered depression; Sims thought that influenced his predominant use of black and white during that period.

[7] In 2014 Kelly organized a show of Matisse drawings at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

[57][58][59] A retrospective entitled "Ellsworth Kelly at 100" was organized in 2023 by the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, and was scheduled to travel to Paris and Doha.

[60] In 1957 Kelly was commissioned to produce a 65-foot-long wall sculpture for the Transportation Building at Penn Center in Philadelphia, his largest work to that date.

Kelly has since executed many public commissions, including Wright Curve (1966), a steel sculpture designed for permanent installation in the Guggenheim's Peter B. Lewis Theater;[61] a mural for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 1969; Curve XXII (I Will) at Lincoln Park in Chicago in 1981; a 1985 commission by I. M. Pei for the Raffles City building in Singapore; the Houston Triptych, vertical bronze planes mounted on a tall concrete at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1986; Totem (1987), a sculpture for the Parc de la Creueta del Coll, Barcelona; the Dallas Panels (Blue Green Black Red) (1989) for the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas;[62] a 1989 sculpture for the headquarters of Nestlé in Vevey, Switzerland;[34] Gaul (1993), a monumental sculpture commissioned by the Institute d'Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France; a two-part memorial for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1993; and large-scale Berlin panels for the Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin, in 1998.

[63] In 2013 Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned the work "Spectrum VIII" (completed in 2014) a large-scale multi-panel painting serving as curtain for the Auditorium designed by Frank Gehry at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris.

[69] Kelly was commissioned to create a large outdoor sculpture in 1968 for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY.

In 1999, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced that it had bought 22 works, paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures, by Ellsworth Kelly.

The USPS press release acknowledges Kelly's pioneering of a "distinctive style of abstraction based on real elements reduced to their essential forms."

[82] That auction record for a work by Ellsworth Kelly was set by the 13-part painting Spectrum VI (1969), which sold for $5.2 million at Sotheby's New York, Contemporary Art Evening sale, November 14, 2007.