String Bean Leaves I by Ellsworth Kelly is held by the esteemed collections of the Whitney Museum and MoMA.

His prints, no less than his paintings and sculptures, have their own distinctive voice. While his paintings and sculptures assert their totemic presence and tangible physicality, his prints register equally important aspects of his vision: intimacy, delicacy and ethereality. Varied in scale but consistent in their formal integrity, Kelly’s prints bear witness to his commitment to the phenomenal world. – Richard H. Axsom

Ellsworth Kelly was a protagonist of hard-edge painting, color field painting and minimalism. Famous for his emphasis on line, color and form he also pioneered the development of shaped canvases, monochrome and multi-panel painting. With his innovations of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the American painter, sculptor and printmaker helped reshaping abstraction in art for decades. Ellsworth Kelly belonged to the generation of American abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, who sought to achieve a form of art liberated from European traditions. Influenced by six years of study in France, Kelly, on the other hand, was interested in European abstract artists, such as Kazimir Malevich, Paul Klee, Constantin Brancusi and Hans Arp. He began developing his concept of ‘impersonal observation of form’, a new approach to abstraction inspired by nature and everyday life: basic shapes and colors found in architecture, plants, shadows. These found compositions opened a new horizon of possibilities to Ellsworth Kelly: “Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made, and it had to be made exactly as it was, with nothing added.” He subsequently used his observations to create simple large geometric shapes with clearly delineated and often curved edges and colorful monochrome surfaces. Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) was born in Newburgh, New York.

Ellsworth Kelly, String Bean Leaves I