Cahiers d’Art Institute is pleased to present the first volume of Ellsworth Kelly: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture. Originally published in print by Cahiers d’Art in 2015, and a recipient of the inaugural Pierre Daix Prize, this volume has been digitized, with minor updates and corrections, for online access.
Written by the art historian and Kelly scholar Yve-Alain Bois in direct collaboration with the artist, the first volume of the catalogue raisonné covers the years 1940 through 1953, including the artist's formative years as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and his time in France, where, as a young artist living in Paris, Kelly began painting the abstract forms that would later define his career. Kelly’s remarkable pace of production during this early period resulted in an especially diverse oeuvre, which is discussed in depth throughout this publication. In Bois’s words, “This diversity is the main reason many of the works examined in this volume are discussed at such length and in such detail: in almost every case, the particular question the artist was addressing, and the formal solution he devised for it, was entirely novel to him.”
This first volume of the catalogue raisonné, which sets the standard for future planned volumes, features thorough and insightful texts, high-quality images of individual works and preparatory drawings, and exhaustive provenance, exhibition, and bibliographic information for each of Kelly's paintings, reliefs, and sculpture, establishing it as the definitive reference tool for institutions, collectors, and admirers of the artist’s work.
The second volume of the Kelly catalogue raisonné—also written by Bois and covering the years 1954 through 1958—was released in book form in fall 2021. A digital version is included here.