His stated aim was to produce art that was figurative and non compositional...he achieved this.
Here's another. .
And here's what has been written recently about it...
"Kelly's Painting for a White Wall
(1952) © Ellsworth Kelly
This severing of the physical link between referent and indexical sign—which amounts to the splitting of the indexical sign from its usual function of communication—is what happens almost by itself in the particular mode of transfer that is cropping, as in
Maillot Jaune and
Tricot. Kelly’s use of cropping has nothing to do with this paean to the subjective and transitory nature of experience—especially since, as one must always remember, what he crops is always flat (if it involves the visual field, and not, as is most often the case, a particular surface in it, it is the visual field as perceived with only one eye). More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that the cropping is itself an involuntary accident, almost like a hiccup or a Freudian slip of the tongue—the sudden “apparition” of a shape as it strikes a chord for being unrecognizable, for being recognized as something the artist consciously knows it is not. Either this shape echoes something already caught in the web of the matrix, or it appeals to Kelly for its potentiality as a score for a new piece, but a score whose material performance in the real world, an “already-made” unperceived by anyone but him, is only the material proof that it can, indeed, exist on its own. The process by which the “already-made” shape is suddenly available to Kelly—while it escapes most of us—is one of defamiliarization, of what the Russian formalists called
ostranenie...
By Yve Alain Bois writing for IAS (Institute for Advanced Study) fall edition 2013.
The thing is that Kelly was very up front about his art and it was John Coplans who decided to neglect the figurative inspiration and sources of Kellys art to the extent that in his first writings on Kellys work, he deliberately did not mention them. Preferring to let the abstract nature have foremost mention. It was a few yeats later that Coplans edited his writing and included the figurative origin and inspiration for Kellys art works.
Kelly was clear that his work was figurative yet the world of militant abstractionism was not keen to hear that and for a while neglected to mention it...
I bet that was a blow.
