Spectrum II

As the title indicates, this work engages the color spectrum. Ellsworth Kelly, however, questions the predictability of the standard red to violet progression, instead offering a passage that begins with one yellow and ends with another. The search for specific color is central in Kelly’s art. He once explained, “It’s very difficult to do a spectrum because each color has to be the right red, the right purple, and they have to blend together.” Here the artist has joined thirteen individually painted canvases producing a work almost twenty¬three feet long. Through this work Kelly has both reinvented the early European medieval tradition of the polyptych (joined multi-panel painting), and challenged the modern convention of the single canvas.